The psychedelic roots of Portishead

Any band that takes ten years to come out with its third album has either dramatically run out of ideas, or has taken its time for very good reasons. After seeing Portishead perform at the Alcatraz in Milan on Sunday night, I am very glad to report that it’s the latter.

I’ve always thought that their music had a peculiar cinematic quality: it would make a haunting soundtrack to a 1950s noir, or a sci-fi flick, or (as my friend Max suggested) one of the better James Bond movies. As they unfurled their rich tapestry of sound the other night, it became clear that they are much more than a trip-hop band from Bristol. They’ve done their homework, so to speak. The same way Bill Viola is no mere video artist, but has become a scholar steeped in his Pontormo, his Wagner and his Zen Buddhism, Portishead have delved into the encyclopedias of our musical heritage, dug out a few distinctive and unrelated sounds that interested them, and remixed them to come up with something that belongs uniquely to Portishead, yet pays homage to those ur-sounds in our collective memory.

Their Milan performance was powerfully “in the flow”, as that of an athlete winning a race, and opened up glimpses into their psychedelic roots. Max said they sounded like the Pink Floyd in the Pompeii period. Pink Floyd, of course, didn’t have a contralto lead singer, and only occasionally collaborated with female vocalists (one would like, though, to hear Beth Gibbons’s cover version of The Great Gig in the Sky, now that I think about it). Texture, complexity and distortion are some of the attributes that link their music to the glorious era of progressive rock.

Their new album, called Third, comes out this month. To read more about its birth (and the band’s instrumentation, including the “lovely old harmonium” elegantly squatting in their studio, bought on eBay for £29), check out this article by Ben Thompson.

An evening with Eels (and with quantum mechanics)

Last Friday I went to the Conservatorio di Milano to hear Eels, an alternative-indie-progressive-country-folk-rock group mostly consisting of Mark Oliver Everett (also known as Mr. E), a musician and singer with a cool Virginian twang. They are touring in their two-man-band incarnation, the other musician being introduced merely as The Chet. (Interesting things happen when spaces meant for classical music invite performers of contemporary popular music – I loved Nick Cave’s concert at the wonderful pearwood-paneled Auditorium di Milano a few years ago.)

The performance combined musical virtuosity and stand-up comedic humor; in a particularly surreal page from Everett’s forthcoming autobiography read aloud by The Chet, Everett recalls getting to Hollywood for the first time in his life, finding himself standing next to Angie Dickinson on the Walk of Stars, and offering her a tape with his music. But there was more autobiography than in most concerts because Everett chose to show the audience, before getting to the music, a one-hour BBC documentary called “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives“.

It turns out that Mark’s father was Hugh Everett, a physicist best known for having been the proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, an interpretation flatly rejected by Niels Bohr (causing Everett to abandon theoretical research and get a job at the Pentagon) and only later rehabilitated as a legitimate (though still a minority) interpretation, popularized for the lay reader in David Deutsch’s excellent The Fabric of Reality, which I recall reading with fascination a few years ago. The BBC movie starts with Mark, an artist with no scientific education or talent whatsoever, realizing he knew nothing about his father. Although Mark and his father lived for 19 years in the same house, and Mark found his body when he died of a heart attack at the age of 51, it was as if they had been living in separate worlds. So Mark, followed by the BBC cameras, sets out on a journey to meet the scientists who had known Hugh Everett, from Princeton to Copenhagen, and gets a rough but effective overview of quantum mechanics (a memorable Schrödinger’s cat is drawn in chalk and dies on a blackboard) in the process of trying to understand who his father was and what he believed: in particular, the many-worlds interpretation does away with the need for an external observer to determine a quantic state, since the wavefunction collapse is only a subjective appearance, and the cat is both dead and alive, so to speak, in parallel worlds. The documentary is set to a soundtrack of Eels songs and is, well, brilliant (but not available online – the good souls at BBC only uploaded a short, non-embeddable teaser on YouTube).

I may be unable to take my Friday nights lightly, but I always love it when I learn something, in addition to having fun.

Draw me into an immersive game

Sometimes I think it’s too bad I’m not much of a Nine Inch Nails fan, because it could be interesting.

Kindle = iPod: incredibly dumb notion of the week

Jeff Bezos is a visionary and, who knows, one day I might be tempted to get myself a Kindle (assuming future versions run on something different than Sprint’s EVDO network). Yet, what I have found to be noteworthy this week is not the device itself, but the hype calling the Kindle “the iPod for books” (here are headlines from Newsweek and Business Week).

It requires the thinking person just about thirty seconds’ effort to come up with at least four reasons to dispel this superficial and downright weird notion.

1. When I bought my first iPod, I spent a weekend or two loading the hundreds of CDs I had bought and loved in my previous life as a music listener. Then, I sold many of the CDs on eBay. When I buy my first Kindle, I will have no way to load onto the device the paper jungle that threatens to take over my home. I suppose I could search for digital versions of the books I loved best, but (as correctly noted by Peter Kafka writing in the Silicon Alley Insider) there is just no way that the Kindle can suck up all my books the way the iPod did with my CDs.
2. Does it matter, anyway? What people do with their music is listen to the same music they know and love over and over again. (To get some variety, I have always opted for the iPod with the fattest memory around, and never owned a Nano or Shuffle, because I would otherwise hardly listen to anything else than the collected works of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, I’m afraid). What people do with reading, unless they have a serious obsession with one particular piece of work, is move on to new book after book after book. I am occasionally tempted to go back to rereading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but I guess what I will do next is to move on to Taleb’s The Black Swan.
3. The iPod changed the way we listen to music by giving our lives a soundtrack in shuffle mode. I don’t think I will ever read snippets of books in shuffle mode – call me a traditionalist, but I’m still a fan of linear narratives and long-form essays with their arguments neatly laid out in the correct order.
4. The most attractive capability of the Kindle, in my opinion, is the ability to search the full text of the books in its memory. So, for example, if I wanted to compare the recurrence of the word “whale” in the Bible, Moby Dick and Pinocchio I could run a quick stat on the Kindle. This makes for an interesting party game (although serious literature and language scholars are better served in their research by more industrial-strength databases and tools). That’s not something that has really occurred to me with the songs on my iPod. It might be an idea for Apple to get the thing to load full lyrics texts together with the music, but it would hardly be a game-changer.

I’m sure you can find more, but, when people tell you that “the Kindle is the iPod for books”, these are just a few of the reasons why you would be well justified in saying that that’s an incredibly dumb notion.

Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto

If you’re on the introverted side – if, like me, you enjoy quiet libraries better than crowded parties, and have shied away from free hugs – it must have happened to you that others have not really understood why. If you’ve turned down a dinner invitation because you preferred an evening at home, you must have been criticized as antisocial. I’m probably not an extreme loner, but my inborn temperament is way out there; it is only thanks to a good degree of conditioning and practice that my behavior – I’ve been told – might even, on occasion, seem that of an extrovert.

That’s why I have immensely enjoyed reading Anneli Rufus’s Party of One, a book that (1) confirms that there are others like us out there, (2) makes it clear that such preferences are largely imprinted in our genes, and (3) argues passionately that a loner is just a loner – not necessarily a sociopath, a pervert, or a serial killer, as lazy media and inaccurate police profiling would have us believe. If you have someone who loves you but doesn’t understand you, give them this book.

Author Anneli Rufus, a loner herself, will take them on a rather exhilarating ride through popular culture, movies, advertising, friendship, love and sex, art, literature, religion, sanity, crime, fashion, travel, childhood and more. The lightest chapter is the one on technology, which does not probe all that deeply in the impact that the Web has had in opening up lifestyle choices for loners (hey, I suspect even the gregarious Tim Ferriss might be a loner, deep down), but gets one thing absolutely right: “The Internet is, for loners, an absolute and total miracle”.

I read the book while sunbathing on a crowded beach. My body was displayed for all to see, but I wasn’t there. I was hiding behind big dark sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. Thanks to noise-canceling Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones, which I discovered thanks to my colleague Paolo, I didn’t hear any of the ambient noise. And I was listening to the moody songs of Jason Molina, which my friend Claudio first recommended to me. I was a loner on a beach. It was a perfect day.

David Bowie and eBay, what do they have in common? Webby Lifetime Achievement Awards

Meg Whitman and David Bowie will both be honored in New York on June 5 with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Webby Awards gig, which once a year polls pundits and common voters to find the “best of the Web”. This year, David Bowie was chosen for being an early advocate of technology in artistic experimentation; the eBay community, in spite of having been around for quite a lot less time (since 1995, i.e. a full generation after Bowie’s artistic maturity), for the company’s contributions as a cultural phenomenon and commitment to innovation, growth and social consciousness. Meg Whitman will accept the award on behalf of 233 million registered eBay users. Past Webby Lifetime Achievement Award winners include Prince (2006) and Al Gore (2005).

This is weird. Will David and Meg be on the stage together? The famously debauched, bisexual, seen-it-all artist, with the CEO who supports Mitt Romney’s pro-abstinence views on sex education in schools? A few months ago, Valleywag grilled Meg Whitman for being a “mom CEO” with “bad taste in Republicans” (she has apparently supported more unsavory characters than Romney). The Boston Globe reported recently that Governor Romney’s policy on abstinence education is being overthrown by Governor Patrick, after the conclusions of a federal study finding that “students in programs focusing solely on abstinence are just as likely to have sex as those not in such programs” (and, I imagine, less safely). Duh. So much for the “self-esteem” and “character-building” that are supposed to come from abstinence. David Bowie, for example, doesn’t look like someone whose early promiscuity deflated his ego. If Meg and David start talking about sex, will someone please put the video on YouTube?