On Cultivation Of Musical Tastes Via Old-School Serendipity

One thing my resolution of not buying music for a year has taught me is that music is more than a commodity. It is more than something to be bought, consumed, and collected. Huge digital music libraries, in this day and age, don’t say much about their owners. Yet we continue to define ourselves by what style or artists we listen to. I think this is misguided - personal musical taste, rather than the musical collection, should be the object of curation.

This is somewhat paradoxical, because the primary way we expand and refine our taste is through acquiring new music. We buy new albums, give them a few spins, and, if we like them, keep them. If we don’t like them, we still keep them because A) the album was an investment and we don’t want to suffer the loss of getting rid of it, or B) the music has been ripped on our computer, and it now pads our iTunes song count. The ultimate end result of both reasons is that we accumulate music we don’t necessarily want. I’m dealing with this right now - I have a couple albums I impulsively purchased from Amazon MP3 at the end of last year, and now I never listen to them. I don’t want to delete them because that would effectively mean I lost $10. What should I do?

I don’t have this problem when I buy used CDs. If I buy a CD and end up not liking it, I give it away to a friend who may like it. If I have no interesting interested friends, I just take it to Goodwill; somebody else may enjoy it, and the money goes to support a good cause. I’ve gotten rid of scores of CDs this way. It’s great. Music on physical media is easy for me to get rid of. But could it be easier? What would be the easiest, most cost effective, legal way to discover new music? Let’s look at where the current options are lacking.

The obvious answer is bittorrent, but that is illegal. Internet radio stations like Pandora or Last.fm, or sweet sites like YouTube Disco, are legal, but they’re not very mobile yet. (You know, for the 95% of the market that the iPhone hasn’t penetrated.) And if you do hear something you like on those services, you still have to go out and buy an album. Besides, the key word in play is discovering new music. There is, almost by definition, a huge serendipity quotient here. This is not music that Amazon, iTunes, or Last.fm recommends to you. This is not borrowing a friend’s CD to give it a listen. This is music you may/would never have sought out on your own. This is browsing the “recent arrival” racks at your local record store.

But browsing racks takes a lot of time. You have to stand there and flip for the better part of half an hour. Also, you don’t know if you’re going to get something good; what if the CD is scratched? There are other downsides: record-store CDs are not (relatively) cheap. Most discs are near the $7 mark - a lot to spend on a album you’re not sure you’ll like. And if you don’t like it, you again have to deal with how or if you’ll get rid of it - kind of mentally taxing for what is supposed to be serendipitous.

So it’s clear we need a music format that is:

*Mobile

*Home to a wide range of music

*Cheaper than $7

*Widely available

*Practically disposable, so that there is no separation anxiety if the album is crap

What am I talking about here?

I'm talking about the audio cassette tape, which neatly fits all of the required categories: You can stick them in a Walkman (which never skips!), you can find every type of music on them, you can buy them at any thrift store in the country for pennies, and because of that you feel no guilt about throwing them away should you not fancy whatever you bought. As the saying goes, it’s a win-win(-win).

Cassettes are so cheap that it is no problem to wolf them down, glean any nutritious value from their music, refine your musical tastes accordingly, and toss them. If you like the music, keep the cassette until it wears out, and then legally download it. That’s the great thing about digital music - you can get practically any music from any time period. You don’t have to waste time tracking down another copy of your favorite cassette.

I love cassettes. A few years back I was driving a borrowed Nissan that only had a cassette player. I went to the local Salvation Army and bought three tapes for like a dollar: David Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise, Nirvana’s Bleach, and Primus’ Pork Soda. Those tapes got really heavy rotation because they were all I listened to when I was driving. The Bowie album was awesome; the other two pretty much sucked. So I bought the Bowie record on CD and the others were lost when the car was totaled and towed.

Experiencing music this way was so easy yet so practical. Musical taste: Refined! Cost? Minimized!

A year later I had my own place and kept a tape player in the kitchen. I spent a lot of time in there and consequently was heavily exposed to the only two tapes I had at the time: Living Colour’s Vivid and Poison’s Look What The Cat Dragged In! Hard rock albums on cassette is a glorious thing. For a reason that I have yet to discern, I took the tape player to Goodwill when I moved. I still don’t know what on earth I was thinking. I recently was given some more cassettes (Public Enemy, Frank Zappa (!!), Smashing Pumpkins, Cream) and now I have no player to play them on. Sigh.

Some might raise the objection that I’m being sentimental. If I was being sentimental, I’d advocate records, which, oops, I already did like two years ago. Records are great for establishing a music collection, not for trying new music out. Try the cassette out, then, if you like it, buy the record. The cassette even mirrors the double-sidedness of a record! Seems perfectly acceptable to me!

Another objection might be in your minds: But cassette’s are only available for old music!

So? The object here is to refine musical taste cheaply. Was there no good music available on cassette? Or have you heard it all? Yes, cassettes are old. So is Hysteria, Aja, London Calling, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, and like a bajillion other albums that weren’t released in the last twenty years. If you’re going to be that elitist, feel free to stick with the Popular Songs Right This Second list on the iTunes Store.

I really do believe that cassettes are the best way to develop a great taste in music - they are the cheapest, easiest way to expose yourself to any and every artist and style of music. It excludes new releases, but who cares? If I want new releases, I can go to Amazon, Ping, iLike, or one of the other dozens of services who want to define my musical taste for me. With cassette tapes, I’m being exposed to music history serendipitously. And much of the music that makes up music history is really, really good. Cassettes deliver that to me. But even if they don’t, that’s OK - in the same motion I can toss it into the trash and pop something else in the Walkman. (As soon as I get one!)

Dann writes from his home in Minnesota, which can be rearranged to spell "Aeon Mints," which, you gotta admit, is a pretty great name for a band.

_DZ

Bicycing Is Only As Expensive As You Let It Become

About an hour ago I got home from a two-hour bike ride. Tonight it was a little above forty degrees here in Minnesota. I am turning into Calvin’s father.


It’s funny how cycling gets to be addictive. One day you pedal into downtown and back, and before you know it you’re covering seventy miles in spandex. Tonight I was riding my Cannondale, trying out my new pedal system. It sounds really snobby to use the phrase “pedal system,” but by that I only mean the pedals, cleats, and cycling shoes. Yes - sigh - I own cycling shoes. I own two pair, actually. I didn’t plan for that to happen, but the snookering corporate cycling giants pulled a fast one on me.

I bought a pair of used road pedals off of craigslist early in the summer to use with my track bike. I knew next to nothing about pedals, so I assumed they would work with any old cycling road shoe. After I bought the cheapest pair of road shoes on Amazon.com, I found that this was not the case. See, I had bought a pair of older Shimano Ultegra pedals that were fairly high-end. And, as it turns out, you need higher-end road shoes to fit higher-end pedals. I had bought shoes that could not possibly accommodate such high-end pedals. I did some more research and found out that there are three or four different pedal/shoe systems out there, so I had to go out and buy different pedals (Keo Look) to fit my shoes. I used that combination all summer.

This week, however, I was again browsing craigslist when I found a guy selling brand new carbon fiber road shoes for a fraction of their original cost. These were high-end shoes that would work with my higher-end pedals that had been sitting under my bed all summer, so I snapped them up. I then go to attach the pedal cleats (the part that you screw on the shoe so it can click into the pedal tightly) only to find that the cleats are A) in pretty poor condition and B) missing parts. No big deal, I say to myself, cleats should only be a few bucks.

Well, new ‘new’ cleats are only a few bucks. New ‘old’ cleats are more than a few bucks. By the time I finally got my pedal system ready to go tonight (many thanks to Grand Performance), I had put over $100 into it. Thankfully, it turns out to be a pretty great pedal system, and hopefully I’m not just saying that to avoid admitting that I spent a lot of money for nothing.

This brings me an actual point, which is to highlight the needless “improvements” that the cycling industry markets on a yearly basis. I would flesh out my concerns in full, but the gloriously irreverent cycling blogger BikeSnobNYC has already done it for me. He did it last year, too. Even if you don’t know much about cycling, they are good reads.

It is truly ridiculous how expensive some of these bikes are getting, and how all the new parts are perplexingly incompatible with the old ones that fulfill the exact same function. Performance is one thing, but we are talking about machines that essentially do the same thing they were doing in the seventies - converting "circular pedaling" motion into "rolling wheels" motion, steering said motion, and stopping said motion. There’s a guy riding in my area who has a nice road bike with 30,000 miles on it. He obviously doesn’t see the need to “upgrade”, and after my pedal fiasco, I’m not sure I do now either.


_DZ

Buying a New (old) Razor Brings Increased Savings!

Recently I saved a bunch of money, reduced waste, improved my personal hygiene, learned a new skill, and stuck it to the Man. In short, I decreased worldsuck in one swift minimalist blow. What did I do? you may ask. I’ll tell you. I bought a new razor.
It’s true, decreasing worldsuck by buying a new razor seems a but far-fetched, but it’s not! Allow me to explain, for those of you who didn’t stop reading after you saw that I “improved my personal hygiene.”

I used to shave with a Gillette M3Power vibrating razor. It required 1 AAA battery to vibrate the blade, supposedly to help facial hairs stand up so they could then be shaven off. The Amazon.com copy for this razor reads like some dude rushed to finish his 4:45 assignment before squealing his tires in search of a cheap happy hour.

"World's best shave. The first micro-powered shaving system from Gillette, for a totally new shaving experience and Gillette's best shave ever. Micro-Power: Turn on it's tiny motor and feel the micro power. In just one M3POWER stroke, you get a closer and more thorough shave. So thorough, there is less need to reshave, which means less irritation. PowerGlide Blades: Patented blade coating produces Gillette's smoothest blade surface for incredible glide, and a level of comfort that only M3Power can give. Indicator Lubrastrip with Vitamin E and Aloe. Gillette's best shave ever - the M3Power razor plus PowerGlide blades."

It is supposed to provide, via “micro-power”, the world’s best shave. Gillette’s best shave, even. I can tell you one thing - using it, I didn’t feel any micro-power. I felt a vibrating, $10, plastic razor. Actually, it came with two blade cartridges, so make that a $5 plastic razor. The glide was, however, incredible.

But, man, the blades killed me. Sixteen cartridges would cost me close to forty bucks. You have to call them cartridges nowadays because they pack multiple blades in one cartridge. The M3 carts had three blades each, and they are spring-loaded. I am not making this up. They are spring loaded, coated with Easy-Glide (“for your pleasure”, I am assuming), and had an “Indicator Lubrastrip” that told you when they were dull and useless. Also, did I mention they were $2.50 a pop? Assuming I got five good shaves out of them (I got, at most, four), that would equal $.50 a shave. A fun equation for this overall cost, for use later, is 10(cost of razor)+2.5x(cost per blade).

I decided to switch razors because this cost was getting ridiculous, the blade cartridges were wasteful, the thin spaces between the blades were hard to clean, I didn’t want to pay for batteries, and the micro-powered, “world’s best shave” was irritating my face. So I decided on a new razor. I admit that I was a bit hesitant about the change, because I had never used any other razor but the M3Power. (Well, excluding that run-in I had with an electric one back in ‘04. )

This is that new razor.

This, ladies and gents, is a Merkur 178. Amazon’s copy for it is remarkably straightforward!

"The Merkur Safety Razor has a chrome finish. Its double edge design provides a very close shave. Its comfortable handle is designed for a non-slip grip. The safety razor has a straight edge especially great for an extra close shave. Blade replacement is so easy - simply turn the knob on bottom of handle turns to screw or unscrew head. Comes with one stainless steel razor blade. Made in Germany. Razor 3" in length."

Three re-reads later, I am still not quite sure if the razor provides a “very close” or “extra close” shave, but I suppose it does not matter. What matters is that the razor is 3” long, which is precisely the amount of space I allot on my sink for shaving devices.

ANYWAY, this razor is everything the M3Power is not: durable, pretty, good for my face, easy to clean, and cheap in the long run. And have you seen prices for straight-edge blades recently? You can buy one hundred for $17. One hundred! And you know these blades are razor-sharp, because they are open-source.

You know how razor companies are always adding more blades and selling new, “better” models of razors? And every new one advertises to be the “best ever” shave, right? My brother has a theory that every time a new model comes out, the blades on the older models get slightly duller on purpose. Think about it. How long does each blade touch a grinder to be sharpened? Milliseconds, maybe? So, if the company reduces sharpening time from 750ms to 550ms, the blade is slightly duller, the assembly line moves more quickly, and the newest razor lives up to its promise of being the “best ever.” Of course, blade cartridges are proprietary property, so, Gillette, perhaps, can restrict anyone else from making them, thus eliminating competition. The blades for my new razor suffer no such fate. Multiple companies make them, so they are motivated to make their blades the sharpest in order to get ahead of the competition. The consumer wins!

At $35 the razor is considerably more expensive, but it’s durable. And I still get about four shaves to the blade, making the cost equation super awesome, coming out to something like 35+.17x. Let’s look at this on an eye-ruining graphing calculator.


Hey, Mr. WebAdmin, that color scheme makes math considerably less cool. Of interest, though, is that graph. The really vertical one represents the M3Power, while the more-horizontal one represents the Merkur. The intersect of those two lines is at 10.7, meaning that as long I can limit my lifetime usage of the M3Power to 10 blades, I have less net spending. The minute I need to use that eleventh blade, however, I save money by using the Merkur. It is not micro-powered, but I think I can live with that.

Are there disadvantages to using the Merkur? I suppose a few. You have to take care of it - wash it, take it apart, dry it, etc. Handling the blades could be dangerous. You have take more time to shave and be more careful with it so as not to cut your face open. But this is where the skill comes in. Electing to learn a skill rather then solely rely on technology is minimalist because you enrich yourself instead of a corporate pocketbook. The more I shave, the faster and better I become at it. Shaving has no longer become a chore, but rather an opportunity to improve a skill.




_DZ

The Logic and Savings of Fuelperks! Promotions

Perhaps in your travels you have seen the fuelperks! promotion that is at many gas stations and supermarkets these days. Every gas station seems to have some kind of free gas rewards system, and in my area, they each have their own supermarket discount buddy. Holiday has Cub Foods, BP/Amoco has Rainbow, and Super America plays the town bicycle and honors any and all competing coupons.

The usual deal in these promotions is “for every $50 you spend on food at X store, you get 10¢ off per gallon of fuel up to X gallons.” This seems like a good deal. After all, groceries are a necessity expense, so why not take advantage of benefits given on a necessary expense? Would I benefit from this deal?

Well, I checked it out. I have two BP stations within a mile (0.7) of my house, yet the nearest Rainbow Foods (savings on up to 20 gallons) is 2.5 miles away. The nearest Cub Foods (savings on up to 12 gallons), where I buy my food now, is 2.6 miles away, but the nearest Holiday station is 1.6 miles away. The nearest Super America is 2.1 miles away.

Goodness, I love Google Maps. Twenty bucks if you can triangulate my address from that info.

This is important because my van gets, on a good day, about 11 miles to the gallon in the city. A round trip to Rainbow and BP is 6.4 miles. A round trip to Cub and Holiday is 8.4 miles. At $2.65 a gallon and rising, (and with the maximum I can save being $2 a fill-up) I barely break even. I usually spend $85/trip on a grocery run, and I do two runs a month.


Is all the running around just to save a few extra cents worth it? Is learning where all the food is in a Rainbow store worth it? Is Rainbow food cheaper than Cub food? Are the cashiers there as cute? These are all the questions I don’t need to answer by not participating in the promotion.

So what about you? Do you take advantage of any sweet promotion deals where you live?


_DZ

Samson: Unbelievable He-Man and Also a Closet Poet!

About a week ago I flipped on NPR and heard a guy talking about his new book. He, a non-practicing Jew, decided to read the Bible cover to cover from the perspective of someone who had never read it before. He wanted to give the general public a fresh look at what was really inside the Bible. From what I heard him say, it was evident that his reading comprehension wasn’t that great, but it did make for an interesting idea. I have been learning about the Bible since before I could read, so such a task is considerably harder for me, but this year I am also reading through the Bible, cover to cover, and a few stories have shone in a different light for me.

One of those stories is the one about Samson in the book of Judges. Every little kid who has been to Sunday School knows that Samson is one of the strongest men in the Bible and a “Bible hero” that people love recounting stories about because it makes good narrative. But have you actually thought about the stories told about Samson? I could recite them all to you, but I had never actually thought about them and considered the implications.

Samson is a dude whom God appoints as one of Israel’s judges but in reality does a lot more of beating Israeli enemies down than he does judging Israel. He’s a violent guy who goes on destructive temper tantrums brought on by grievous Philistine actions. One famous story involves him killing 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey.

A thousand people! Dead!

I always had the mental picture of Samson using a half a jawbone instead of a whole jaw assembly, but he could have used that too. Either way, that’s a lot of people bludgeoned to death with a piece of bone.


Several questions immediately pop into mind. The first one being, “What were the last hundred Philistines thinking?” I mean, they just saw Samson destroy 900 of their comrades. Did they think they had a chance? They probably had to climb over their own dead just to get to him!

Secondly, how long did this take? Maximus (from the film Gladiator) can win at hand-to-hand combat in about seven seconds, but he has a sword, so let’s say that Samson dispatches these guys at a rate of 1 every 25 seconds. That’s 25,000 seconds, or about 417 minutes for the whole lot. About seven hours of slaughter, though probably much longer. Did this become a spectacle event? Were there shepherd boys sitting on the hills cheering and keeping a running death tally?

And what does Samson do after he kills all these guys? Does he loot them for stuff? Does he take a drink of water? Does he spit on the corpses and walk away? No! He sits down and thinks, “I’m pretty frickin’ awesome. Man, am I awesome! I need to write a poem about how awesome I am.”

And he does!

After seven hours of bludgeoning grown fighting men to death, he sits down and writes, “With the jawbone of a donkey, I have made donkeys out of them / With the jawbone of a donkey, I have killed a thousand men.”

Truly there has never been a finer example of brazenly self-centered, raw, masculinity.

I wish I had thought about these stories in this type of way much earlier! I wonder what else the Bible has in store?



_DZ

Second Life: Unlimited Ability to Create The Ordinary

The other day I watched a presentation by Linden Lab CEO and Second Life creator Philip Rosedale. Second Life, for those of you who don’t know, is a virtual world in which people interact with each other on a social and economic level much like, well, Real Life. Once you register an account in Second Life (SL from now on) you can create an avatar that represents you in the virtual world and in that world you can make friends, set up a business (or two!), attend social events, and even learn at an educational institution. In his talk Rosedale explained the motivation behind SL and the ideas he has for its future.

The first question he introduced was “why build a virtual world at all?” I say ‘introduced’ and not ‘addressed’ because, try as I might, I never found him directly answering this question. He instead took a round-about approach in which he gave some history of himself - how he was a creative kid who always wanted to build things - as well as his opinion on the purpose of the Internet.

Mr. Rosedale thinks that the ultimate use of said Internet is to simulate a world in which we have the unlimited potential to create. He thinks that everyone on earth has awesome ideas but is limited when it comes to actually realizing them. Second Life, then, is supposed to be a space where we can create without boundaries. Rosedale actually likened SL to outer space. Like outer space, he said, virtual worlds fascinate people because they allow us to reinvent ourselves. They allow us to begin again. And, like outer space, virtual worlds allow us to fantasize that maybe, just maybe, if we went far enough, we would find a place that will allow us to create a whole new identity. We truly have no idea what we will find if we travel far enough.

This perplexed me, because as I watched screenshots of SL pop up on the PowerPoint behind him, I saw nothing but objects and places that could easily be produced in the real world. A slice of watermelon. A Japanese-style outdoor boardwalk. A jazz bar complete with grand piano. If SL is supposed to be this awesome place where we can create anything, why are all the objects in it so familiar? Though space in SL is purportedly boundless and its world boasts 100 terabytes of user-created content (25,000 times bigger than World of Warcraft), why is it all familiar? Sure, I might run into something weird like a player avatar who has an internal combustion engine for a head, but an artist can draw that, can’t they? You don’t need a computer to display that creativity.

Maybe creativity isn’t the point. Maybe the point of SL is to bring people from all over the world together. SL claims to have a population of about 250,000 residents, all sharing information with one another. Rosedale says that virtual worlds, and SL in particular, are the best way for us to organize, share, remember, and experience information. He used the example of a common object, a chair. The web as we know it now presents information in the form of text and links, and maybe a few pictures. SL shifts everything to images. Creativity is expressed solely in graphic form. If I show you a picture of a chair instead of just telling you about it, you’re more likely to remember that I talked about a chair. And everyone, regardless of what language they speak, understands an iconic representation of a chair.

But what does this do to abstract thought? If I casually insert a chair into a story without elaborating about it in any way, you would conjure up an image of a chair in your head. Maybe it would be an image of your favorite chair at home, or a chair at Grandma’s house that you had fond memories of as a child. Or maybe the only chair that comes to mind is The Chair from the movie Juno. Regardless, you have now, on a cognizant level, interacted with my mention of a chair in a way that is meaningful to you. My description of a chair may be utterly forgettable, but your mental image will stick with you. Your ability to think abstractly has been enhanced.

Though SL features an interactive environment with 3d graphics and personal avatars, it is not a game. There is no way to win; there is no overarching goal to achieve. The point is simply to be social and creative. Because of this, SL has its own economy. Players are able to buy land from Linden Lab, set up shop, and sell virtual goods and services to other avatars. The SL currency, Linden Dollars, or L$, is able to be exchanged for real dollars at any time.

The existence of an economy makes sense when the point of the virtual world is to create. Rosedale points out that people who create want two things - fair ownership of their work and the ability to sell it. If the whole point of a virtual world is to provide an infinite playground in which to create, it is natural that an economy is right behind. When money comes into play however, things can go awry rather quickly. Pyramid schemes surface, adult entertainment runs rampant, and people have to be more wary of one another in general. Money corrupts the innocent and pure rather quickly.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think that Rosedale created Second Life with altruistic intent. People can create, sure, but they have to pay Linden Labs for that privilege. SL is a business just like any other online business. It creates content and tries to sell it to consumers as value. The rather utopian notion that people can be anything or anybody they want is refuted by the participants themselves who merely re-create the real world in cyberspace. True freedom to create anything one might imagine is so paralyzing that people keep to what is safe. As one Second Life user I talked to puts it, “Everywhere you go in SL, it’s either Star Wars or nudity.”


_DZ