The first song, "Nonpareil of Favor", opens with a harpsichord, followed quickly by an irresistibly upbeat rhythm section and a catchy pop tune which lasts all of a minute-and-a-quarter before slipping into something more comfortable: a slowed-down swinging verse which makes it maybe half another minute before they decide that what they really want to do with this song is hammer the same chord very loudly for a couple more minutes, accompanied by harpsichord. Then they decide that they're instead going to hammer the same chord more quietly under a hazy mix of vocalization and...celeste, I think? It's better than it sounds - the hammering in the middle is jarring at first, but they do good things with it.
Third song: "For Our Elegant Caste" opens with the immortal lines,
We can do it softcore if you want
But you should know I take it both ways
We can do it softcore if you want
But you know that I go both ways
The next iteration of these lines turns into a round, mostly in falsetto, and this brings up another characteristic of of Montreal: they are the single gayest-sounding band I have ever come across - quite apart from their lyrics, which admittedly don't contradict that impression. For me, this is utterly delightful, though the exuberant camp might grate on some people.
Another characteristic is their habit of inserting bits of - sometimes spoken - dialogue into their songs: from "An Eluardian Instance",
You sat me down, we had some drinks
And you told me all kinds of insanity
I asked your friend if you were available
She answered, "no, but yes, oh well oh well yes and no."
From "Women's Studies Victims",
Then threw me out into the snow, I waited for the bus
Up came some values voters screaming are you one of us?
I said, "Of course man can't you see I've got some text reconstruction?"
(What does that mean?) No clue. It must be illicit - pentagram.
(What are you talking about?) No clue.
And from "Triphallus, to Punctuate!",
"You should call me sometime.
I won't answer but at least I'll know you care."
"How will you know it was me?"
"What do you think, I've got caller ID."
Which is charming, is the point.
Also! These songs are incredibly obscene in the most delightful way imaginable. "Plastis Wafers", for instance:
I confess to being quite charmed
By your feminine affects
You're the only one with whom
I would roleplay Oedipus Rex
I want you to be my pleasure puss
I wanna know what it's like to be inside you
I want you to be my pleasure puss
I wanna know how it feels
There's really a hell of a lot to say about this album, and you should listen to it yourself, so I'll leave you some surprises, but just a quick overview: "For Our Elegant Caste" is two-and-a-half minutes of the most enjoyable ear-heroin I've ever come across; "Gallery Piece" is a wonderfully schizoid love song; "Women's Studies Victims" is the perfectly representative blend of pointless referentiality, interpolated dialogue, and really catchy upbeat tunes; "Plastis Wafers" is both incredibly catchy and so very obscene. In summary! Fifteen very catchy, layered, ADHD songs. Well worth listening to.
Last week I said I would deliver my opinion on the state of the world. Then I realized that this would be stupid as I just have half-educated guesses based on very limited and probably inaccurate readings of Marx, collateral knowledge of economics, and wild extrapolation. Thus I will not do that, instead sticking to subjects I know things about. Next week - let's see - how about Gorillaz' Demon Days and Plastic Beach? That sounds good. Should get some film in as well. Season 5 of Doctor Who, or maybe one of Clint Eastwood's westerns. Also literature assuming I have time to read. Eventually I'll finish Swann's Way. Been in the middle of it for over a year now goddamn.
Side note: somewhere back in the archives - way, way back - there's a cringingly embarrassing fanboyish rant about xkcd. I think for the sake of honesty, integrity, and justice, that I should say that the person who wrote that was young and foolish and that xkcd - and the nerd culture that has sprung up around it - is little more than festering shitegobs predicated on, among other things, a tribal mentality of "us" v. "them", a smug assumption of false superiority, a belief that a store of utterly trivial knowledge somehow makes one a better person, the utterly perplexing belief that having Asperger's Syndrome is a virtue, and a mindless conformity to all of the above.
To clarify: I understand where these self-described nerds are coming from. It's a lot like the worldview of me and my peers - we're all fairly elitist, we all like stereotypically nerdy things - roleplaying games, sci-fi television shows, superhero comics, video games - and there's more than one aspy in our ranks. But there are differences. We don't have the martyr complex of the high school nerd, we don't judge people by how much Batman trivia they know - and more importantly, we have knowledge - and discussions - of the non-trivial variety: about literature, physics, biology, chemistry, history, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, higher math, Talmud, Bible, music, art, psychology, sociology - you get the point. The point is, we're intellectuals, not nerds. We've all been - and many of us still are, to some extent - part of the nerd culture I've described. The thing is, we all grow out of it.
The fetishization of the nerd is a perplexing, fairly recent pop culture phenomenon. If you've seen the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the past few years, you've noticed it: the immense hype surrounding it, the movies and books that have been made about it, the media personalities condescending to the victorious middle-schooler who is orders of magnitude more literate than they. And, by and large, it's awful. Don't get me wrong, I love the spelling bee. But my god is it painful to watch the media milk adorable younger siblings of contestants, or interviewers asking some eighth-grader who was favored to win how it feels to be eliminated in the fifth round on some word only spellable if you've happened to have come across it before. Also, Akeelah and the Bee was an unholy abomination and should have been aborted in the first trimester.
Or perhaps you've watched a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory, which is about the lives of physicists as imagined by someone who's never actually hung out with any sort of intellectual. The laugh track is the least objectionable portion of the show. Or perhaps you've come across My Life Is Average, a website founded in response to the pathetic whinging of Fuck My Life, a website populated entirely by anecdotes of stupid people about their terrible lives. MLIA started out as a rather clever statement, where people would post completely mundane, uneventful stories about their lives. Then it became a circle-jerk for nerds to congratulate each other on how delightfully quirky their lives were and how they recognized that Harry Potter was superior to Twilight, apparently forgetting that one step above awful is still just mediocre. Or, again, maybe you've come across the creepy, bitchy, faux-intellectual, artless pile of shit that is xkcd. I used to call these people nerd posers. Then I decided that they were real nerds and I was not. And that's fine with me.
Probably I should justify this vitriol. In particular, I realize that my accusations of "a tribal mentality of 'us' and 'them'" and "a smug assumption of false superiority" may seem hypocritical, and that this whole thing may seem like mere wankery. So let me justify my statements a bit more: I have a friend, a third-year undergraduate, and young for that, who gives talks on mathematical logic at graduate conferences, and knows a great deal about literary theory, philosophy, foreign film, Kafka, and midrash. I have multiple friends who know so many languages it will make your head explode. I have a friend who reads Heidegger for fun. I have an undergraduate friend who is trying to get a Ph.D. in Classics so that he can become a practicing neurosurgeon. And yes, we are far too insular; and yes, we all, virtually without exception, fanboy or -girl hard over Doctor Who; and yes, many of us have inside jokes which stem from our Shadowrun campaigns; but we don't glory in being unable to interact with people outside our peer group; we accept people who think Zelda is the protagonist of Ocarina of Time; we don't consider non-intellectuals beneath us.
...except for nerds.
Not convinced there's a difference? Yeah, I get that. Not very convincing. I'm not quite communicating here. This is my emotional reaction, and I have yet to completely rationalize it (that might seem a bit ex post facto to you, but I think that's a big part of how our minds work. The reaction is prior, and if you can honestly justify it, then good, and if not, you need to fix your reaction.) So I'll keep working on that - I welcome any input - but I do sincerely think there is something severely wrong with nerd culture as it currently exists.
One last note, re: Asperger's - I hope my comments won't be misinterpreted as prejudice. I have a moderately high-functioning cousin with Asperger's, and a couple of close friends who are quite high-functioning - not that "some of my best friends are, etc.", but rather that I've had some experience with it. Obviously, it's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's something that makes your life more difficult in a lot of ways - something you have to struggle against. My cousin, for instance, can instantly detect spelling and grammatical errors in a document, but has a hard time grasping that not everyone is as interested in All in the Family or ALF as he is. One of my friends has had to reverse engineer a sense of humor and is knowledgeable about theories of humor, which is admirable, but he doesn't have the instinctive feel for it that most people do, and so he tends to say legitimately very witty things at inopportune moments. What I dislike - and I'm open to correction on this point - is people who feel that Asperger's excuses their antisocial, obsessive behaviors and that they therefore don't have to try to change, and everyone else should just put up with it.
Oh, and you should really check out the blog I linked above. It's amazing.
10 comments:
I'm sorry, I don't MEAN to make anyone's head explode. I hear that can be a bit messy.
Are you......Levi?
You just have that effect on people, my dear Foreman.
And......yes. C'est moi.
I don't care if xkcd is bitchy, it is given me this glorious mental image:
http://xkcd.com/78/
Bill Waterson on acid -- oh yes.
I mean, yeah that's a pretty good strip. It's also deeply ironic considering that Munroe is now producing the same sort of mindless comic. The comic about how quoting Monty Python is overdone because quoting isn't wit is likewise ironic given that a good deal of his comics are really nothing but nerd-panderly references. Actually, you could probably go through the early archives and find a lot of decent or even good comics that are deeply ironic in light of his later work.
Also, Jim Davis wrote Garfield. Waterson was Calvin and Hobbes. Or it's possible I misunderstood what you were trying to say there.
Waterson was anti-licensing. That's what I was referencing -- the hypothetical dadaist Jim Davis is equivalent to a drugged Bill Waterson.
Maybe it's because I was never a huge fanboy of xkcd, but I still enjoy it in spite of the drop in quality. He had a fairly good homeopathy joke a few days ago and a few great entries pop up now and again.
Ah yeah, got it. Makes sense now.
Gonna have to disagree with you about the homeopathy strip. The joke is basically just the "homeopathy is silly because diluting stuff doesn't actually make it more effective" bit which everyone has heard. Tim Minchin (among others) did it better in "Storm". Munroe just added semen. 762 wasn't that bad, though. 761 was only mediocre. 731 was kinda pretty, the alt-text in 721 was okay, and absolutely nothing else in the past hundred xkcd strips has been anything other than absolute shit.
So, I promised I'd write up my thoughts and here they are (too long, but oh well). First a bit of quote-and-response, and then an overall reaction.
"I have once again jammed a bloated parenthetical in between the subject and the predicate." < As I say: fine. Hehe.
"Or perhaps you've watched a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory, which is about the lives of physicists as imagined by someone who's never actually hung out with any sort of intellectual." < This could easily be true, and it struck me as at least a little surprising or counterintuitive that, if it is, that would mean that the physics consultants never once mentioned this. I guess they figured they'd promptly be ignored (perhaps on the grounds that the writers probably thought the falsifications were necessary for the show to have mainstream appeal). Or maybe they figured it'd be way too difficult to actually explain to the writers the culture of real nerds/intellectuals (and I'll have something to say about the terminological confusion below).
"My cousin, for instance, can instantly detect spelling and grammatical errors in a document" < This is completely tangential, of course, but I'm curious as to what grammar he uses. I'm guessing a prescriptive one.
So, about the terminology. When I first saw this chart:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2430/3896009598_779b11ceba.jpg
I was actually annoyed. My mental reaction was, "These distinctions are not observed in practice." But that would almost seem to imply that the creator was some sort of lexicographer or grammarian. In fact, they probably based the chart at least somewhat on their own judgments, and just made stuff up to fill in the rest of the picture. To assess how much I agree or disagree with it, I'd have to think about each intersection individually, but at any rate some of the claims in the chart strike me as dangerously close to arbitrary. Maybe I'm taking it too seriously, but whatever.
Now, for my judgments. It seems to me that there's reason to discuss three terms: nerd and intellectual (because they're crucial to the blog post) and philomath. At the risk of seeming evasive, I'll go ahead and say that my understanding of intellectual is probably basically the same as that of reasonable people in general (I say that not to brand people who understand the term differently than me as unreasonable but to exclude the warped misperceptions of the serious anti-intellectuals out there). I've considered myself a nerd for a while now, a term that for me can encompass both people who are interested in learning (perhaps especially those who have particular interests) and the subculture(s) associated with things like sci-fi; video games; comics; the Internet (including webcomics like xkcd); and certain books and movies—which things, if you think about it, have very little straightforwardly to do with love of learning (perhaps with some exceptions toward the end of that list). A philomath, in turn, is, quite simply, a lover of learning (especially math, according to W3, but the broader sense is even more useful), and you don't want to leave home without knowing both it and its pentasyllabic adjective philomathean (I've italicized the stressed syllable).
So, as I said, I'd definitely call myself a nerd. I would be flattered if someone called me an intellectual. I wonder how deserved that'd be, but hopefully more and more so, especially if my career plans work out. But I wouldn't call myself an intellectual—it just seems to me to be way too conceited to do so. I do consider myself a philomath—learning stuff (if it's the right stuff, which varies depending on the person) is just plain fun, and sometimes really, really fun—but I recognize that that term has the potential to be considered pretentious. (cont.)
Now, I inferred from Levi's blog post that he at least formerly thought that nerd "should" refer to philomaths, but because it often refers to the subcultures I mentioned above, he's proposing restricting that term to them and calling himself and his philomathean friends, with their deep and demonstrated interest in the "serious" subjects he mentioned, intellectuals. (I would personally avoid that replacement because, as I said, it strikes me as way too arrogant when used in reference to oneself.)
What I find slightly amusing is the following contrast. Levi seems to present the fact that his friends are actually interested in "serious" stuff like physics, philosophy, literature, and so on as though it were somehow surprising. Which it kind of is against the backdrop of the sci-fi–&c. sense of nerd. Whereas I, having had pretty little contact with that kind of nerd, and knowing that they exist primarily through their depiction in pop culture, much more readily associate nerd with philomaths interested in "serious" stuff. Which is in turn probably why I'm glad to keep using both nerd and philomath in that sense, whereas Levi's glad to ditch the former.
If anything I've said has been unclear, just ask: I left out some clarifications and avenues of inquiry because I didn't want this to be even more obscenely long than it is.
Also, in the blog post, there are two typos in the string a cringingly embarrassing. Also, for future reference, Bill Watterson's last name has two < t >s. Feel free to delete this comment once any necessary changes have been made.
OH GOD COMMENTS. Ahem.
Yeah it always seemed weird that if the BBT was going to have people around to make sure they got the physics right, that they would completely disregard getting the people right. After all, the only reason to get the physics right is if your target audience is the kind of people supposedly portrayed in the show. Then again, the target audience of nerds who wish they were physicists is probably much bigger than the target audience of physicists who also happen to be nerds. So I guess that is a pretty clever marketing strategy.
I'm...actually not sure about my cousin's grammar. Presumably, yes, prescriptivist. That's a very aspy way to approach language.
I grok your reluctance to apply the term "intellectual" to yourself. That said, I feel comfortable applying that term to me and my peers, and you, by way of contrast with groups you don't seem to be very familiar with. I feel no twinge of guilt calling myself intellectual in comparison to the aforedescribed nerd culture, or the culture of evangelical Arkansas. It is elitist. I'm pretty okay with that.
Interesting that you would imply that presciptivist grammars are inferior in the very same post in which you correct my orthographical - okay okay I fixed it. It's better now. Good call.
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