Sunday, January 17, 2010

Best of the Decade: 2000-2009

Hello all. Just thought I would throw these out there. They're a bit more consumable than my Year in Review format, and hopefully they'll introduce you to some new favorites, or at least spark your interest enough to give some of them a second look/listen.
NOTE: The titles for each of the visual works (films/tv shows) links to a youtube video sampling of each, and in the music section, the titles link to Amazon.com, where you can sample each full album.
Enjoy!
The 15 Best Movies of the Decade
At first I struggled to come up with more than a few of these, but all it really required was digging further into the earlier part of the decade. So sadly less than half of these films occurred in the second part of the decade, and it seems the trend of cinematic entertainment is taking a turn for the worse. I can only hope that this is not the end of quality cinema, but is instead part of a reset process that will eventually spawn an entirely new crop of films in the years to come, resulting from the democratization of filmmaking technologies.
Whether or not people have forgotten (or tried to forget) about our Hobbit friends and their adventurous cohorts, this was easily the greatest sci-fi/fantasy trilogy as of yet in the 21st century, and has become a phenomena at the center of Western culture. Amazing how a strange, fantasy epic that is almost 80 years old, the writer of which has long since passed, holds up and thrives in modern cinema. The films were also pioneering for cg visual effects, especially the success of the large scale battle scenes and fully-integrated digital characters like Gollum.
Memento is one of those films I feel we will keep coming back to. The introduction of this film is the second time over the past few decades where the foundation of traditional linear storytelling is shaken to its core, the first being the haphazardly mis-ordered Pulp Fiction. In addition to the novelty of effectively reverse-time storytelling, the interesting subject matter (the world through the eyes of a man dealing with short-term memory loss) and the suspense of the narrative up until the very last scene makes Memento a winner for the ages.
While many are still shaking their heads trying to figure this one out, and still more have trouble even explaining why they like it, it's hard to deny the impact Donnie Darko has had on our cinematic psyche. As much as now-Superstar Jake Gyllennal gave the first great performance of his career, it can be said that the late Patrick Swayze, through this film, gave his last great performance (Thank you, Jim Cunningham). While Darko may have been director Richard Kelly's one-hit-wonder, the combination of psychological thriller, time travel themes, and a kick-ass 80s soundtrack created a film that will be borrowed from, copied, sourced, and referenced by other young directors for decades to come.
David Lynch holds in Mulholland Drive a dreamlike, fractured masterpiece, that plays out in the darkest corners of Los Angeles. This film allowed Lynch to garner a Best Director Oscar nomination, while it sparked the new career of the full-ranged and fantastic Naomi Watts. Nevermind what you thought of the plot, if there was one at all, this is the pinnacle of semi-mainstream art cinema.
Who knew we'd ever hear from the zany Baz Luhrmann again, after he transformed Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet into a drug-induced, alternate-reality, MTV-laden mess (which I loved, by the way). Moulin Rouge took him from teen magazines to the Oscars, and created a new, modern edge for the film-musical.
It's been almost seven years since it was released and I still can't get City of God out of my head. A deeply disturbing but exhilarating portrait of the slums of Rio (Brazil), City of God managed not only to create a memorable narrative (based on real events) with striking imagery and editing, but it's also hard to look back on it and not see the influence it's had on box office smashes like Slumdog Millionaire. Even if you only see it once, it is not to be missed.
Wall-E is the first of what I am hoping will be a long stream of mature multi-audience successes by Pixar. Funny and original, along with environmentally and culturally critical, the level of nuance reached through the utterly HUMAN relationships between ROBOTS in the film, is a first-ever for animated film. If future animated films follow Wall-E's example, I see only great things ahead for us.
After a few stumbles, our beloved Robert Downey Jr. is back, in by-far the most relevant, action packed, and well-executed superhero film to date. Where all other Marvel franchises have failed, Iron Man succeeds. Hopefully the upcoming sequels won't ruin its legacy.
While Before Sunrise of 1994 you could have taken or left, Before Sunset, chronicling the rendezvous of two young lovers after a long ten years of seeing each other, is indispensible. In this rare instance where the sequel trumps the original, characters Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) walk through the streets of Paris and discuss how melancholy their lives have been without each other in the time since their last meeting. A masterpiece of longing and character nuance, this collaborative effort between Hawke and Delpy, along with director Richard Linklater is a must-see for all romantic filmgoers.
Matt Damon in a series of successful spy/action thrillers? Who would have thought? Interesting plots, gripping action sequences, and a hand-held, jolting, energetic style sets the pace for modern action-drama. Jason Bourne has essentially supplanted James Bond in the action psyche of America.
This sweet modern tale of a cute young French girl finding romance in Paris, coupled with the rich style of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children) was enough to pull this foreign language film into the American mainstream, making even the surliest viewers smile, while seducing them into reading subtitles for two hours straight.
Whether you loved or hated them, 2003 was the year of The Matrix Sequels. Reloaded, if you scrape away the extremely over-hyped marketing, poor pacing, misplaced scenes and weak character development, it rocked. If you watch the film on its own, and view it as less of an action film and more of large-scale work of in-depth philosophical inquiry, it's a masterpiece yet to be equaled. I highly recommend listening to the film critic and philosopher commentaries on the blu ray/dvd. I think this film is unfairly overlooked time and time again, and will hopefully be viewed by future filmmakers as a valuable resource for integrating philosophy into cinema.
Probably the most bleak vision of the demise of humanity to date, Children of Men also broke ground in cinematography, and set the bar for future post-societal dramas. Visceral and suspenseful, with a great cast.
The only film by a former music video director that makes the "Decade" list, Michel Gondry and madman-screenwriter Charlie Kaufman are a match made in heaven. Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkenson, Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst all turn out great performances in this highly original, surrealistic romance-comedy-drama that ponders the implications of using memory-erasing technology, were they to exist. A beautiful film.
Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep star in this stunning novel-to-screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours. The movie steps back and forth through time to show portraits three different women in her own time. The most memorable performance is Nicole Kidman as the morose and mentally unstable Virginia Woolf. Julianne Moore plays a 50s era housewife dealing with the pressures of motherhood and the sad struggle for independence as a woman during that era. Meryl Streep is Mrs. Dalloway, the close friend of reclusive writer Robert Brown (Ed Harris). A thorough examination of the tragic circumstances that surround each of the female leads, The Hours is executed beautifully by ace director Stephen Daldry. The movie also has one of the best film scores I've ever heard, from composer Philip Glass.
The 7 Best TV Shows of the Decade
This past decade has taken TV to a new level, and far beyond the various horrible sitcoms and prime-time soaps of the 80s and 90s. This includes a select few network dramas, as well as quality offerings from cable channels such as HBO, Showtime, FX, and most recently, AMC.
24 (2001-)
Strangely enough, this series about a fictional counter-terrorism agency was conceived of several months before the 9/11 attacks, and was premiered in November 2001. Of course the attacks made the show all the more prescient, and set off a series of story points concerning real locations, and pondered real philosophical dilemmas in the face of an ever-present network of terrorist threats. For instance "Guantanamo" and "Homeland Security" references flooded into the second and third seasons, while the ethics of prisoner torture, public vs. private interests influencing government decisions, and the implications of corporate warfare became common themes in the later seasons.
24 was also the first television series to feature an African-American as the President of the US, in this case the heart-of-gold David Palmer (played by Dennis Haysbert). It also rekindled the career of one Kiefer Sutherland within Jack Bauer, 24's front man, who remains prime-time television's ass-kicker of choice. With a relatively weak 6th season, 24 was able to pull off a great 7th, while moving the show's location to Washington DC, and adding a new female American President Allison Taylor, played by the Emmy award-winning Cherry Jones. The 8th (and possibly final) season is set to take place in New York City, and will be what I'm hoping to be a stunning conclusion to this heart-pounding and thoroughly engrossing show.
I probably would have given up on Lost a long time ago were I not completely addicted to it. JJ Abram's kinetic and mysterious series about a group of plane crash survivors who are marooned on a island in the South Pacific, has somehow managed to remain afloat while choosing out-there themes and exploring the ever expanding depths of its characters (and unfortunately killing many of my favorites). 2010 will see the final season of Lost and we viewers will decide whether or not the show is a complete mess, or a bona-fide triumph.
While I've only caught the first season of Mad Men as of yet, color me impressed. I think the most interesting part of the show is the time period in which it takes place- the early 60s, after the haze of WW2 had cleared and when the women's and civil rights movements were fresh on the horizon. What better setting for a group of misogynistic young and middle-aged men to play out their individual existential crises? I look forward to future seasons, which as I've heard so far, are brilliant.
What started at the end of the 90s came to fruition over the entire past decade. While it probably went on for a few seasons too long, the now-famous psychological exploration of fictional modern mafia man Tony Soprano can't be denied as one of the most compelling and culturally-influencing dramas to date.
A drama featuring a band of mostly no-name actors about a family-run funeral home sounds like a recipe for disaster. Instead, we get a series devised by American Beauty writer Alan Ball that thematically pushes the limits of television drama in its every step. At the same time psychologically deep and lighthearted, dramatic and funny, Six Feet Under easily sits among the greatest television series ever made.
The Wire simply IS the greatest television show ever made. Over its five seasons, it managed to remain fresh and interesting, while depicting in detail the dramatic reality that takes place every day throughout American cities. From the drug trade, to government politics, to our public school systems, to our prisons, to the media, it shows us how despite our best intentions, our systems are fundamentally broken and in dire need of reassessment. It tells its tales from all points of view, including drug traffickers, cops, lawyers and ordinary citizens, as well as the upper echelons of city government. With the nuance and integrity of fine literature, The Wire is a true classic as it is a historical document of early 21st century American society.
Every American should see this series, if for no other reason to appreciate the history and struggle of our nation to establish itself, from the perspective of one of the US's most neglected forefathers. Paul Giamatti is excellent as John Adams, as is Laura Linney, who plays his no-nonsense wife and closest advisor, Abagail Adams. Tom Wilkenson also stars memorably as America's beloved quirky genius, Ben Franklin. This extremely well done seven-part miniseries should be required viewing for all Americans, so that we can see and appreciate how we've come to live in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
The 25 Best Albums/Artists of the Decade
Despite the dominance of single-song digital downloads over the past decade, which altogether threatened the album format, a great many musicians and bands still managed to turn out formidable, coherent full-length releases. These are they. Check out the GrooveShark Playlist directly below for a sampling of each of the albums I list.



Fluid and seamless, highly original electronic madness, Amon Tobin's catalog continues to grow, but this is (as of yet) his best.


Two-disc, uncompromising masterpiece from the man who invented IDM (whether he likes it or not). Richard D. James is insane, and his Drukqs, my constant companion.

Radiohead - Kid A & Hail to the Thief (2000 & 2003)
While Radiohead had a lot of solid releases this decade, 1997's Ok Computer was a hard act to follow. Kid A succeeds. Hail to the Thief is one of their more under-appreciated releases, but after many listens holds up to and even exceeds both Amnesiac and In Rainbows.
Dido's sophomore release has some great tracks, and while it doesn't have quite the impact of 1999's No Angel, it's still highly replayable.


Hard-hitting, witty and hilarious, self-reflective and self-deprecating but adept hip hop. While others might champion the Marshall Mathers LP, I would say instead that The Eminem Show is his crowning achievement.

Seeing as the lyrics to Lamb's Cotton Wool were recited at my wedding, I hold this music close to my heart. It's sad that they've since broken up, because Darkness and Wonder was such an phenomenal album. I guess it was a good note to go out on?
I read an interview with Tiesto recently, and he said that he's most influenced by film scores, so it makes total sense why I'm attracted to his dance mixes. The entire In Search of Sunrise series blossoms with lush, fast moving anthems. I'm not a huge trance fan, but this stuff is in a class of its own.
Sarah McLachlan - Remixed & Bloom (remix albums) (2001 & 2005)
Sarah McLachlan dance remixes are like salted caramel-chocolates- almost too good to be real. Equally catchy and energetic, and in its best moments, awe-inspiring. Mixes by Tiesto, Junkie XL, and Talvin Singh are among the highlights.
His first remains the best, before he got all caught up in the tragic bullshit of being superstar. A classic.


The first time since Reverence they've pulled off such an ambitious album. Bombs, Music Matters, and Last This Day (feat. Dido) are my favorites.


The first full "narrative" album since The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor still has it after all these years. Easily my most listened-to album of the decade. Check out The Good Soldier, The Great Destroyer, and Zero Sum for a nice cross-section sampling.
Super chill, post trip hop, this album almost requires a cocktail in hand. Indra and Lebanese Blonde are the best known tracks, and rightly so.


Best release this decade from The Roots, bridging their original soulful anthems to their newer rock-laden sound. Just throw on Don't Feel Right or Here I Come and you'll hear what I'm talking about.

Chronicles Tori Amos's eclectic road trip across the US, post 9/11. The best release from Tori in a long time.


Imogen Heap - Speak for Yourself & Ellipse (2006 & 2009)
Imogen Heap stole my heart this decade. While Frou Frou's Details was decent, Imogen's solo work is superior. Both Speak for Yourself and Ellipse are better consumed in their entirety, but if I had to pick choice tracks, Daylight Robbery & Just for Now on Speak for Yourself, 2-1 & Wait it Out on Ellipse. See a full review of Ellipse in my 2009 In Review post.
Another top pick for 2009. Two albums down, Melody is just getting started. She makes Norah Jones seem like a sad amateur. Brand new Jazz that has an instantly classic sound.

Not sure how exactly to classify this album, but let's just say it's Depeche Mode meets Aphex Twin meets 8-bit Nintendo themes. The lyrics are super ironic but in a deadpan-serious way that makes them even funnier. Musically the album has only scratches the surface of Exile's live show, but it's definitely one that gets better with every listen. Ing tree.
70s classroom filmstrip on acid, and my most favorite BOC release yet.



The last great, definitively Shadow album. Almost sneaked by undetected when it was released... don't miss it!


Hard to top Nia, but Blazing Arrow manages to up the ante. Actually caught their show in LA, in support of this album. Great stuff.


Massive Attack - 100th Window & Danny the Dog (soundtrack) (2003 & 2004)
Massive Attack continues to make great music. A long way from Blue Lines, and bit more airy than Mezzanine, 100th Window is a highly original and impressive release (love the tracks with Sinead O'Connor). Danny the Dog (Jet Li film released in the US as "Unleashed) soundtrack is the best electronic score I've heard since The Dust Brother's Fight Club.
Some hits and some definite misses for Madonna this decade. The disco-infused "Confessions" is a definite hit, with a hybrid mix of analog synths and lush landscapes.

Portishead was somehow able to reform after 11 years of absence and create this astoundingly good follow up to their 1997 self-titled release. A decidedly different tone, cleanly breaking from its trip-hop roots, while at the same time remaining unquestionably Portishead.
One of my more obscure, politically active hip hop discoveries of the decade, Lif is an entry point into some of the more exciting threads coming out of a genre saturated with so much bullshit these days that it's difficult to wade through. A rising star with a lot of potential if I've ever seen one.
I've been listening to the tribal/electronic hybrid of Juno Reactor for years now, and though their albums can sometimes stray into sappier territory, Labyrinth is as hard hitting as it gets for them. The album also features several tracks that were injected into the score for the Matrix Reloaded, including the pulse-pounding Mona Lisa Overdrive from the freeway chase scene. Love it.
Here's to a new decade, and hoping for new works behind our wildest dreams!

posted by Polymathic Resonance at 2:18 AM 0 Comments

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Embracing the Tiger - 2009 In Review

For the majority of 2009, I felt very much like I was treading water. As in 2008, throughout the year I worked towards completing several Teaching Company classes, in the interest of forming a finite body of knowledge that would enable me to finish my screenplay, Golden Gate. And though I absorbed volumes of new knowledge, and read literally STACKS of books, I never felt quite prepared enough to complete the screenplay. It didn't make any sense.

It wasn't until the final third of the year that I realized my process of writing the screenplay was a microcosmic indicator for the momentum of my entire life. If I continued to use this model of exhaustive self-schooling to dictate the end of the script, it would never, in fact, get done. When I finally sorted this all out, and was able to disconnect the screenplay writing process from my other academic studies, the future immediately began to reveal itself, as something that I could have never predicted.

By November I had sold my professional HD video camera on ebay and renounced any future plans of becoming a career film director, a goal I had been holding onto since I was in high school. But while I expected to feel sad about this sudden break, I instead felt instantly better, the moment the camera was out the door, and I began to look upon my life with fresh eyes.

This whole academic endeavor I've taken on over the past few years, while I've welcomed and enjoyed it, was a unconscious attempt to stave off any creative projects, films or otherwise, in the interest of delaying a future that I didn't want anymore. By letting go of old, long burned out dreams, I freed myself from my own bounds, and I can now see the near infinite scope of my creative interests- things that have been smothered for close to 10 years. Admittedly reading existential philosophy like that of Nietzsche, examining the life Leonardo da Vinci, as well as beginning to study Tai Chi and Taoist thought, has helped me tremendously to get to this point.

What I see for the year 2010 is not the same, tired routine of "one day everything will be great", but an entirely new landscape waiting to be explored. As my friend Kyra K. says, it's The Year of Making it Happen. I'm equally terrified and excited to get started. But either way, here I go.

Top Ten Things Learned or Reinforced in 2009:

10. Less is more.
9. Seek stillness in motion.
8. True harmony is in opposites, and equilibrium, by definition, is death.
7. Greater comfort is found stretching beyond the bounds of your comfort zone.
6. In order to strike out towards new discoveries, you need a very good launch pad. (I love you Sadie!)
5. The world is more complex than we can and will ever possibly be able to conceive.
4. The daunting complexity of the world is no reason to give up trying to understand it.
3. Our conceptions of who we are will torment us if we don't allow them to change.
2. The proof is in the pudding, but things are not always as they seem.
1. Change is the only constant.


Best Movies of 2009:

Up
Add Up to the slowly growing list of emotionally complex but equally entertaining stream of animated film coming out of Pixar, standing right alongside last year's Wall-E. I first watched Up while stuck at home on a sick day, and it just made my day so much better. The first montage totally broke my heart- I found myself thinking- "Jesus... isn't this a cartoon???" No. It's far more than that. This is a tale of growing up and accepting the reality of change in one's life. It's about sons dealing with absent fathers and a rediscovered sense of adventure behind the guise of just another grumpy old man. It's about letting go of old bonds and making new ones. And on top of all that, it's hilarious!

Pixar continues to push beyond the bounds of the Disney, Looney Tunes-infected paradigm of animated films of the late 20th century and is creating entertainment that is continually able to touch and move us, young and old, in truly human ways. A must-see.

Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino has now thoroughly proven himself in tackling such a wide variety subject matter within his cadre of out-there cinema, rarely failing to please- whether it's hit men and cheeseburgers (Pulp fiction), sword-wielding samurai mommies (Kill Bill), demented homicidal stunt drivers (Death Proof), and in the case of his latest film, Inglourious Basterds... the demise of Nazi power in Europe. The film depicts an alternate ending of WW2, where a heavy southern drawl-bearing Brad Pitt leads a group of rag-tag Jewish-American special forces soldiers (appropriately called "The Basterds"- misspelling intentional) to decapitate the upper echelon of the Nazi regime and force an unconditional surrender, before the Allied Forces can step foot on the beaches of Normandy. Of course they have only one chance to get it right.

I think what I enjoyed the most about this film was not only Tarantino's to-be-expected formulation of truly memorable characters and great dialogue exchanges, but also his ability to make such a oft-visited cinematic subject matter his own. "Basterds" is something you haven't seen before. No heart-to-heart soldier trench-talks "first thing when I get home I'm going to..." here. No view of the day-to-day horror and struggle to stay alive inside the Nazi concentration camps. This has all been done before, and done well, by various directors. Instead, this is an insane, hilarious, brutally violent, Nazi-hating dark comedy, the likes of which Tarantino is alone capable of directing.

Up in the Air
I don't think I had ever really seen a movie where I've so thoroughly enjoyed a George Clooney performance before I saw Up in The Air. Helmed by Jason Reitman, director of last year's uber-popular "Juno", comes this well-crafted comedy/drama whose main character Ryan Bingham (Clooney) makes a living as a business "consultant" who flies all over the country, hired by different companies to assist in massive staff layoffs. Simultaneously he writes books and holds seminars which tout the triumphs of a transient, desire-less lifestyle, and how your personal "baggage", which contains all of your material belongings as well as the relationships you hold with others, is much easier to carry when it is "empty". Throughout the film, Bingham presents and reaffirms the commitment to his personal philosophy to everyone around him, including a fantastic scene where he lectures his young work-travel partner Natalie (Anna Kendrick) about how to most efficiently pack a suitcase, and to pass through an airport TSA checkpoint.

Bingham runs into a few snags when he is presented with some difficult family situations later in the film, as well as several encounters with an attractive fellow traveler (Vera Farmiga) who he meets on the road, calling into question his entire worldview. As in Juno, this is not your typical run-of-the-mill holiday Hollywood fodder. This is truly great filmmaking that will make you laugh, and will stick in your head while so many other films dribble out the other ear.

District 9
I wanted to hate this film. Everything from LOTR director Peter Jackson blessing the vision of a fanboy, to the hype and the annoying ad campaign, made me turn up my nose. Maybe I was just jealous. But after so many proof-positive recommendations from respected parties, I broke down and finally saw it.

Simply, it rocked. While there are plenty of action scenes and tons of visual effects, the story was what really got me engaged in this one. When I found out later that the treatment by humans of the refugee space aliens in the film was meant as an allegory for the South African Apartheid, I had an even deeper respect for D9's integrity. A great performance by Sharlto Copey as the idiot-bigot turned freedom-fighter Wikus, and some of the most creative creature animation I've seen in a long time in a live action film, married with the documentary style (but luckily not motion-sick inducing) cinematography puts this film in the running to become a sci-fi classic.

Avatar
When I saw the first trailer for James Cameron's Avatar, like many, I was extremely disappointed. You'd think that after working professionally in the motion picture industry for nine years, I wouldn't judge a movie by its trailer. Maybe it was because my expectations were so low was the reason I liked Avatar so much- but I really, really did.

Avatar takes place on a distant alien world, where a profit-hungry, high tech corporation is trying to exploit the indigenous population for the extraction of a rare element, humorously referred to as Unobtainium. This isn't the first time James Cameron has approached these types of themes, pulling from movies he directed almost 20 years ago, namely Aliens and Terminator 2. But this is a whole different ball of wax. In this film, an indigenous population of giant blue humanoid creatures known as the N'avi fight back against the human occupiers and certain humans they refer to as "dream walkers", who are able to inhabit a host body that looks and acts just like one of the N'avi. The humans refer to these surrogate bodies as Avatars.

The N'avi worship and have an intimate relationship with all of natural things that surround around them. As scientist Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) explains, not only is it a spiritual connection, it's a biological one, that connects the entire planet together as a single organism. I love this idea. Many books I've read over the last year on both complexity and holistic philosophy muse at this idea in their own ways- that all things in the universe are connected together in a meaningful way, and that this connection can and will be proved through science eventually. So it was rewarding to have this idea reflected in popular culture, in what very may well be the highest grossing film of all time. If not, certainly the highest grossing SCIENCE FICTION film of all time, which, being a huge science fiction fan, tickles me to think about.

Like most James Cameron films, the major conflict is the backdrop for a separate love story that runs throughout, this time a John Smith/Pocahontas relationship between one of the N'avi females and ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), one of the humans living connected to the N'avi world through an Avatar. Even with it's blatant retelling of classic hero myths and love stories, it still managed to remain engaging throughout its near three-hour running time. It's difficult to write a movie based on a "hero saves the world and gets the girl" concept and retain some kind of freshness these days, but Avatar seems to have done it. Likable (and hateable) characters along with exposition that was well-paced and seamlessly integrated with the action sequences are what truly made the film sing- a winning combination that Cameron is famous for.

While none of the acting performances stand out in particular (though having Sigourney Weaver back in a sci-fi film is enough to get me more than a little excited), the visual fx technology is, I can safely say, the most advanced ever seen by the human eye. Congratulations to Weta, ILM and the other houses that were able to participate in such a groundbreaking exercise. I'm kind of bummed I didn't get a chance to work on it, but then again most films I work on are hard to enjoy after having been directly involved. So in this case, I was happy to take the loss if it meant making the movie enjoyable.

I think the stereoscopic treatment of Avatar, or so-called "3D" that requires you to wear special glasses in the theater, was the least gimmicky in the films I've seen that feature it. That said, it's still a gimmick, no matter how hard they try to repackage it. I really didn't see this particular attribute as paradigm-changing, and it won't be, until filmmakers can create something you can experience without special glasses and present in a way that won't pull you out of the film. I do understand that in a modern technological landscape with high definition home theater experiences, that Hollywood needs something to keep people coming back to the theater, but 3D is just not that thing.

Overall, this was definitely a film to be experienced in the theater. If you missed it, catch it quick! IMAX it if you can. Though I think it will also look pretty amazing on blu ray. I'm not sure if you could quite call it a "classic" just yet, but I think it has all the indications that it might be. Only time will tell. There's talks of it becoming a trilogy, which is certainly a tantalizing idea, but only if James Cameron is in the director's chair. The man has yet to make a bad movie (post Terminator at least).

Favorite Albums of the Year:

Imogen Heap - Ellipse
I first heard Imogen Heap back in 2002 as part of a Frou Frou track on the independent radio station KCRW while I was driving through L.A. I remember grabbing a pen and writing down the name of the group on the back of my hand, and though I didn't know her by name at the time, and never went as far as to pick up the Frou Frou album, I always remembered the very distinct sound of the singer's voice. She reminded me of a contemporary version of Annie Lennox, whose work I highly respect and throw on once in a blue moon. In 2004 I heard the Frou Frou track Let Go over the credits of the movie Garden State and I instantly recognized it as them. But even though I liked the song, and I watched and rewatched Garden State in the years afterward, I still hadn't picked up the Frou Frou album.

It wasn't until this year, 2009, that I was surfing the net and a picture of a woman with wild dark hair flashed onto the front page of the subscription music service Rhapsody.com. The words below it declared: "Imogen Heap - Ellipse - New album just released! Click to hear it now!" "Image-who?", I thought. I of course didn't click to hear it now. It took me several more days, and visiting Rhapsody many more times and seeing Imogen's face over and over again before I finally I broke down and said, "Okay, who the HELL is Imogen Heap?!" I dumped Ellipse into my playlist to see what all the fuss was about.

I liked it right away. It was very much in the style of some of my favorite music: solid, female-driven pop/symphonic electronica, with great hooks, eclectic instrumentation and creative lyrics. It wasn't until the second track that I thought "Wait a minute- she sounds REALLY familiar." So I clicked on her bio page on Rhapsody and sure enough, this was the chick from Frou Frou, whose voice I'd always dug, and whose rise into the mainstream over the last few years I had somehow completely missed. And since then all of her work has been in constant rotation at work, at home, on the headphones... everywhere and all the time.

Ellipse is Imogen's third solo studio album, and starts out with the track First Train Home, a rather lighthearted but firm declaration of her constant urge to return and work in her home music studio, perhaps at the expense of whatever romantic interlude that happens to stand in the way. The album progresses with the soulful Wait it Out, which hearkens back to the style of her last album's global hit Hide and Seek. It's followed by a group of tracks that range in emotional complexity, from the sweet and gentle Little Bird, to the largely comedic Bad Body Double and Aha!, to the quietly sentimental and instrumental The Fire, to the heavy-hearted final track Half Life. My favorite track on the album by far is 2-1, whose odd lyrics I can't quite decipher, but whose epic nature and screaming emotional intensity leaves me breathless every time I hear it.

Ellipse, upon countless replays, is so full of nuance, emotion, and innovative musical prowess, that it has become not only my favorite album of the year, but has placed Imogen Heap among one of my favorite artists of all time. Listen and listen again. I can't recommend her highly enough.

I also had the distinct pleasure of catching Imogen live at The Fillmore here in SF (easily the best music venue in the city) back in October. Her stage presence is kind of hysterical, actually, or at least it was for our show. Whenever she used a new instrument or piece of equipment, she described and demonstrated it in detail. The highlights were the tiny wireless microphones she had glued to each of her wrists (so cool!). Throughout the show, like a mad scientist, she ran around the stage, fiddling with exotic instruments, tweaking knobs and pressing buttons, while mumbling to herself how nothing was quite working properly. It was fabulous.

She also described the creative process of Ellipse and the theme represented in each song she played. The album largely lays out the soundscape of her everyday life in her childhood house in England. As an adult she personally bought and moved back into the house, converting the basement into her new recording studio, where the creation of Ellipse took place. The house itself is actually elliptically shaped, hence the name for the album.

Overall the show at The Fillmore was among the most personable I've been to. Imogen had the audience feeling like we were old friends of hers, having perhaps come over for dinner and then for drinks in the studio afterwards, where she showed off her insane musical creations. This type of show may only be possible in intimate venues like The Fillmore, but I highly recommend the experience if she comes around again in the Spring of 2010.

Melody Gardot - My One and Only Thrill
Melody's story is one of tragedy and triumph. In 2003 she was riding her bicycle through Philadelphia, PA, when an SUV ran her off the road. She sustained several serious debilitating injuries, requiring her to spend the better part of a year in the hospital, and afterward that she walk assisted by a cane. She has also problems with her short term memory, and her eyes are so sensitive to light that she has to wear special tinted glasses at all times.

While she was in the hospital, not able to sit up in her hospital bed to play the piano as she was classically trained to do, she instead took the time to teach herself how to play guitar. When she emerged from the hospital she was a completely new being than when she entered. The cover of Melody's second album, My One and Only Thrill, pictures Melody, a striking woman with flowing long blond hair, wrapped in a dark jacket, with her dark rimmed glasses with a subtle smile. But it doesn't do her justice, as my wife Sadie and I found out when we caught Melody in concert at the Palace of Fine Arts this fall. And what a Thrill it was.

The show started out with the stage enveloped in dim red light, almost like a photographer's dark room, leaving only the outline of a microphone stand. Melody arrived onstage slowly, sauntered over to the microphone stand, gingerly wrapping her hand around the microphone, and began to hum a sweet, bluesy tune, accompanied only by finger snaps and the occasional pounding of her heel upon the stage. Several bars into this stellar A Capella rendition, she gestured to the audience to help her keep the rhythm going with our own finger snaps. You could still only make out her silhouette as she sang and swayed back and forth, soaking the hall in her ethereal voice.

Ms. Gardot's presence onstage throughout the show, though she eventually emerged into slightly more revealing light and was joined by several band members, continued as smoothly and serenely as she had arrived. In between her songs, she shared anecdotes and answered quips from the crowd with the language and sense of a mature, articulate, and veteran jazz musician- like someone on her 20th world tour; not someone who was just starting out. Sadie and I were shocked to find out later that Melody is in fact only twenty-four years old. Seeing her in concert, you would never know it. She purveys at once the charm of Nina Simone and the prestige of Billie Holliday, while at the same time remaining her very own.

Melody's musical repertoire is a mix of jazz standards and original compositions, ranging from symphonic ballads to Latin-laced lounge; from the care-free boisterousness of young love to the quiet pain of the blues. My One and Only Thrill covers this full range of emotion, and at its darker points calls to mind Billie Holliday's Lady in Satin, one my all-time favorites. Though it is a stellar accomplishment and is among my most favorite albums of the year, I think that one will have to look to future projects of Melody Gardot to see where she will go next, which I for one wait for, with eager anticipation.

Tim Exile - The Listening Tree
Tim Exile was one of the opening acts for Imogen Heap's show at The Fillmore that I caught in October. While The Listening Tree is a sarcastic and simultaneously complex electronic dance album, the real gem is Tim Exile's live performance setup. His use of technology, including Native Instruments "Reaktor" system, enables him to treat electronic music in a highly creative and organic format, that is a far cry from the "two dudes with a laptop" bands of the earlier part of the decade. When he opened up for Imogen, within his circa 20 minute set he managed to perform several songs from his albums, as well as to venture out into the crowd and take voice samples of various audience members, after which he returned to his console and was able to instantly whip together some great composition, based solely on the samples he had gathered. It was truly inspiring, the way he melded himself so seamlessly into his equipment. Hopefully Mr. Exile become a trend-setter for newer, subsequent live electronic acts.

Best Books I Read This Year
I can barely count the number of books I read parts of or in their entirety this year. The ones I list and review below are chosen because out of everything that I read, they were the ones that managed to completely change way I look at the world. I couldn't recommend them highly enough.
Wired for War by PW Singer
PW Singer, author of such books as (Corporate Warriors and Children at War) has a broad expert knowledge of the military, the current state of globalized conflict and how it relates to technology now and in the coming ages. You can tell by reading the interview-rich pages of Wired for War (not to mention its massive notes section and bibliography) that Singer has done his homework. From current uses of unmanned Predator air-drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the bomb-disarming Pack Bots used against Iraqi IEDs, to the future use of robotic surveillance against the fledgling terrorist networks that seek refuge in failed states like Yemen and Somalia, Singer covers it all. He also considers the asymmetrical counter-tactics of insurgent groups and the philosophy and ethical dilemmas behind the warfare of man versus machine, also known as the "distance problem" of technological warfare. An incredible portrait of a world addicted to technology and the resulting changes in the landscape of warfare, with deep insights into what the future may hold, Wired for War is a treasure trove of information, and by far the best book I read this year.
This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
Dr. Daniel J Levitin has a Phd from Stanford in Neuroscience, though he got his start as a session studio musician, engineer and producer for such acts as Blue Oyster Cult, Steely Dan, Santana and The Grateful Dead. So it makes perfect sense that he might choose to write a book that attempts to explain the strong emotional response we have to the veritable ocean of available music in our modern electronic lives. Dr. Levitin answers many of the long-sought questions regarding such a fascinating topic, and explains why music is such an essential part of the human experience- from to the ancient tribal rites of passage to our current culture of instant-gratification via internet downloads. With a thorough analysis of the most cutting-edge brain experiments to date, as well as entertaining anecdotes and a personable style, this lean but mean volume will leave you clamoring for more.
The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra
I covered this in depth in a previous post, Leonardo da Vinci: Scientific Revolutionary?. In the book Dr. Capra lays the groundwork for an ideology of holistic philosophy and champions the polymath sensibilities that spring forth from the life of the great Leondardo Da Vinci. The Science of Leonardo is an inspiring and enlightening call to arms for a new generation of possible Leonardos, that need only to know his path to begin follow in the footsteps of the original Renaissance Man.
Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio
While I'm not a math nerd per se, this was a book that came out just at the right time, when the direction of my personal studies pushed me to ask this very question. Dr. Livio, an astrophysicist heavily involved with the Hubble space telescope, covers this topic succinctly and exhaustively, taking the reader through the long history of mathematics while simultaneously representing the views of those skeptical to its usefulness and effectiveness. A truly enlightening read that puts into simple terms so many unnecessarily complicated ideas, and strips away the academic snobbery and illusory mystique of the "divine language" of mathematics to expose it for what it truly is- an extremely effective tool for interacting with the universe that surrounds us, and that deserves reverence and appreciation for what it has brought our civilization.
Happy 2010 Everyone!!! Best Wishes to you and yours.
-Nowell

posted by Polymathic Resonance at 10:09 AM 2 Comments

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Enter the Quantum (Becoming, Part 2)

I ended 2008 casting skeptical eye on Rationalism, and its ideology of a fundamental, mathematically harmonious universe. Plato's ideal of the mathematician as purveyor of "divine" language just didn't sit well with me. So I was forced to look elsewhere, to perhaps provide a more satisfying explanation for my day-to-day experience of harmony while walking through the city.

I pushed away thoughts of anything "divine" and purely speculative philosophy, and instead focused on modern science, and its studies of time and space. Admittedly I was inspired by the new season of the tv show Lost, and their new plot trajectory, which featured certain members of the cast jumping back and forth through time. The show over the last several seasons had persistent references to Stephen Hawking and his book A Brief History of Time, so I felt it was a good time investigate him further.

It wasn't long after reading bits and pieces of Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell, as well as watching/listening to several interviews with Brian Greene (author of The Elegant Universe), that I encountered String Theory full-force. String Theory attempts to bridge the gap between Quantum Mechanics and Albert Einstein's Theories of Special and General Relativity, which in turn fulfills the ultimate dream of Einstein himself: to formulate a theory that explains all matter that exists in the universe. This is commonly referred to as the Theory of Everything (TOE). The TOE remains the veritable holy grail of the physics community.

String Theory hypothesizes that the fundamental building blocks of matter are tiny vibrating strings of energy, which could explain the strange behaviors behind quantum particles. Fresh off of my Music Listening course, my interest was sparked by string theory's concept that perhaps the universe could be understood through what is essentially "music", created by these theoretical strings vibrating at different frequencies.

But before I could understand string theory fully, and staying loyal to my normal disposition to make things as difficult as possible on myself, I needed to know more about both Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, the aforementioned two disciplines within physics that string theory attempts to combine. Luckily the Teaching Company once again had just what I needed: a twenty-four lecture audio course on just those two subjects.

After about a month of Relativity/Quantum Mechanics lectures, I was already sufficiently fried by Einstein's extreme and historic break away from classical physics as defined by Issac Newton (and all prior assumptions about gravity and the nature of space and time), when the quantum world had swooped in immediately thereafter and pulverized any remaining semblance of the universe as a harmonious or rational/logical place.

Quantum Mechanics attempts to describe the behavior of subatomic particles. The types of subatomic particles that make up the quantum landscape are so numerous, some refer to it as the quantum particle "zoo".

I'm sure you've heard the terms protons, neutrons, and electrons from your basic science classes in junior high school. You may have even heard of Quarks before (a name derived from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake). Quarks are particles that combine with each other to make up protons and neutrons, the two types of particles that in turn make up the nucleus of the atom. There are not one, but SIX different kinds of Quarks, that are named based on their propensity to behave in certain ways. They are (get ready): Up and Down, Top and Bottom, Charmed and Strange Quarks. Weird names, right? Others you may not have heard about (but do most certainly exist) are Mesons, Leptons, Gluons, Neutrinos, Tau-Neutrinos, Muons, Electron-Neutrinos and on and on.

The erratic behaviors of this "zoo" of subatomic particles, over the last hundred years or so have been proven by scientists to define most of what are considered to be the fundamental forces in the universe. These include electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear force, and gravity. Gravity is the least understood of the forces on a subatomic level, hence the problem of resolving Einstein's theory of General Relativity with Quantum Theory. If Gravity could be defined by a Quantum particle, it would be called a Graviton, but as of yet, no Gravitons have been discovered. The Higgs-Boson, the so-called "master" or "God Particle" (the search for which is one of the key endeavors of CERN, the multi billion physics facility in Switzerland), is supposedly responsible for determining the masses of all other particles, per what is called the Standard Model of particle physics.

Beyond the comical and sometimes confusing naming conventions of quantum particles, there are certain behaviors that each of these particles perform, that are not only odd, but are so outlandish, even to the point of being paradoxical, and defy our very sense of logical reality. Quantum behavior is so unpredictable it can never be measured with any level of precision.

Normally if you want to measure something's position and velocity, you use a classical Newtonian view of the human-level physical world. The particles in this sense are like billiard balls, bouncing off of each other as well the walls of a billiard table. Their position and velocity are predictable, because the initial energy put into them (say a person hitting the cue ball with a cue) stays constant.

However at the quantum level, these "classical" rules break down. The movement of quantum particles is only probabilistic, meaning their position and velocity are not simultaneously measurable. The more you focused on measuring its position, the less the accurate your measurement would be for its velocity.

Worse, the behavior of particles in quantum mechanics can be paradoxically defined in two different ways, as either a discrete stream of particles or as a wave. Rigorous experiments have proven that our observation of quantum particle behavior, in itself defines whether the behavior is particle-like or a wave-like. Left unobserved, the resulting quantum behavior is wave-like, and observed, it is particle-like, as if somehow it knows we are watching it. Like I said before- rational explanations must be completely thrown out to understand the quantum world.

Below is an excerpt from the film What the Bleep do We Know? However cheese-ball the film's execution might have been, it's a great explanation of the famous two-slit experiment and the resultant mysterious quantum particle/wave conundrum.



If you'd like a better illustration of the quantum paradox on a somewhat more human level, one needs to look no further than the amusing thought experiment known as Schröedinger's Cat, originally devised by Nobel Prize-winning Quantum Physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1933.



As you can see, quantum mechanics doesn't make sense in the face of a logical, causal world we believe ourselves to be in. On the quantum level, all logic breaks down. It is erratic, non-deterministic, and just downright strange.

Just a few years prior to the mainstream study of quantum mechanics, Einstein had defined his theories of Relativity and was already an established legend within the scientific community. He had an extremely difficult time believing the results of quantum experiments, and stated several times that there must be an error in the form of measurement that scientists were using, to produce such absurd and seemingly counter-intuitive results.

Another fascinating quantum behavior is called Quantum Entanglement. With Entanglement, two particles in completely different places, react in the same exact way to modification. So if a scientist were to affect some kind of change on one particle, another "entangled" particle would react as if it were directly influenced, even though it was never technically "touched". Here's another clip from What the Bleep that can further explain this.



Einstein was extremely put off by the experimental data that revealed Quantum Entanglement behavior. He referred to Entanglement as "Spooky action at at distance". To him there was no way that two particles could ever interact with each other without a visible transfer of energy between the two. The explanation would have to be supernatural, if not mystical. Therefore Einstein considered it to be scientifically invalid.

Despite Einstein's gripes, the results stood. Entanglement and other quantum behaviors are some of the most rigorously tested in all of the history of science. Einstein admitted at one point that was had spent approximately 600 times longer trying to resolve quantum theory than time he spent formulating Relativity.

After digesting these lectures (and repeating several of them) I shared Einstein's skepticism. When learning about Relativity Theory, there's a learning curve to be sure, but it was still based on LOGIC. The quantum world as a whole just didn't make any sense in comparison. No matter how many times it was explained to me, I continued to wonder how reality could on a subatomic level be so illogical? It was in complete opposition to everything I'd ever known about science.

In the interest of retaining the momentum of my studies, I decided to brush myself off and push ahead towards string theory, as I had planned before I was assaulted by The Quantum. I was extremely disappointed to discover how simplistic string theory now seemed in its relation to the quantum world. I couldn't help but see the parallels between this situation and how the Rational thinkers of antiquity first looked in the face of Chaos.

I felt string theory's attempt to define the behavior of quantum particles with such radical mathematical concepts, using multiple virtual dimensions that rely on undetectable particle partners proved it far too insubstantial to ever be a contender for the Theory of Everything. Useful mathematics to be sure- but incomplete. Too many missing pieces, and too much abstraction. I felt like string theorists had gotten lost in their own equations.

In sum, 2009 began with another swift kick to the gut. Everything I had studied and invested myself in the previous year in an attempt to reinforce the idea that we live in a harmonious or even logical universe, was annihilated in twenty-four, half-hour lectures. I couldn't lie to myself. The game had changed, and needed to be reassessed. But instead of sitting down and writing a thoughtful essay or blog post to more deeply explore these ideas, integrating into the paradigm- I chose to fight against it. There had to be a more meaningful existence than modern science was able to offer us- a complete, logical explanation for the fundamental operations of the universe, as opposed to the random bumping around of oddly-named particles of energy. Or waves. (!)

What I realized is that in the expulsion of metaphysics from my studies and my pursuit of quantum mechanics and string theory at the furthest reaches of modern science, I again found myself in the midst of disciplines that required philosophy to come to terms with them. Not only philosophy, but philosophy completely different than I had yet encountered, with twice as many new questions as the ones I had originally sought to answer, such as:
  • Can something really exist in two places at once?
  • Can something behave differently, depending purely on the observation of it?
  • Does the question "What is the Theory of Everything?" even make sense???
  • Is the world presented by quantum physics the most "fundamental", or is there something different, like string theory, that lies yet beneath?
I was getting nowhere, digging into this seemingly infinite regress of reductionist science. If quantum mechanics is defined by the perception and observation of the human mind- then what exactly is the human "mind" that is so powerful as to define reality itself? For that matter, what is consciousness? Where does it come from? Is it just small bits of electricity surging through a hunk of meat in our heads, or is it something more, something truly "divine" as the Rationalists declared? There was only one place to go from here...

posted by Polymathic Resonance at 2:04 PM 1 Comments

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Music of the Spheres - The Journey Begins (Becoming, Part 1)

On one particular sunny weekday in the Fall of 2007 I ascended the subway staircase to the surface of Market Street at Powell and began my daily morning walk through Yerba Buena Gardens to the South of Market district of San Francisco where I work.

Maybe it was Mozart's Requiem blaring in my headphones, or maybe I was in a particularly placid mood that day, but as I walked on the street, it felt like time had slowed down just slightly. There was a light wind in the air and as I walked with my fellow downtown commuters around me, I started to feel this overwhelming peace come over me. I felt like I was part of this great organism that was San Francisco, floating along like a gentle stream. The light was beautiful. The cold air coming into my lungs felt somehow nourishing. I felt like I belonged there, and my whole existence harmonized with the city. It was as if I could feel myself moving through time.

When I got to work I immediately pounded out a quick email to myself describing my experience. I wrote things like "I walked in the sunshine, on stars, in harmony with the city." It was as close as I've ever been to what I guess you could call a "mystical" experience. And it wasn't just once- it started to happen more and more often. I decided to dig deeper.

My first instinct was to do internet searches, typing in things like "city harmony", "universal harmony" and "city symphony". Of course what I found were the usual suspects of bad Youtube video projects as well as squishy new-age message boards, boasting conversations about star constellation alignments and crystal energies, that as a rational person I couldn't bring myself to believe. Nothing I found satisfied me. Fearing that bringing it up in normal conversation would have the same airy backlash as my internet searches, I decided to keep my experiences a secret, and just enjoy them for what they were.

In January of 2008 I stumbled upon my first audio course from The Teaching Company, Intro to Greek Philosophy at the SF Public library. The lectures were fantastic, and totally eye opening for me. The philosophies that stuck out the most were those of Heraclitus of Epheseus, and Pythagoras of Samos, both of whom were philosophers before the time of Socrates, now commonly known as the Presocratics. The basic writings of the two philosophers were the closest I'd heard that could verbally explain the harmony I experienced while walking through the city.

Heraclitus, as I've mentioned many times in past blog posts, believed the fundamental nature of the universe was flux, ever changing and flowing like a river, which reminded me of the liquid-like sensation of my experience. Pythagoras on the other hand talked about something that was even more intriguing to me at the time, what he called "Music of the Spheres". He believed that the stars, the planets (the spheres), and everything on earth was "made of number," meaning the entire universe could be expressed most fundamentally in the language of mathematics, which to him was synonymous with the language of music.

I started checking out library books like "The Pythagorean Sourcebook", "The Music of Pythagoras", and "The Art and Thought of Heraclitus". While all of them were interesting, Pythagoras's studies of music and his experimentation with musical scales was more thoroughly engaging of the two. Most importantly, instead of off-handed metaphysical statements about the nature of the universe, Pythagoras's philosophies figured in directly with modern mathematics and music theory, fields that had developed over the last 2500 years, and were still heavily relevant in our culture and academia.

As the year wore on I started getting up an hour early to listen to the lectures and take notes. Eventually the lectures became a part of my daily morning routine, as regular as my cup of tea or my walk down from Powell Street Station into SoMa. I borrowed more and more from the library; classes on science, ancient history, and music. I eventually ended up exhausting the SF Public Library as a resource and instead had to resort to browsing The Teaching Company's website, and buying the classes directly from them, to quench my ever-growing thirst for knowledge.

As I progressed through the History of Science classes in particular, Pythagoras's ideas about the fundamental mathematical harmony of the universe came up again and again. As I learned, the idea was heavily influential to the philosophies of Plato around 350 BCE, rode the sharp upward and downward trajectories of the Roman Empire through the earliest parts of the 1st Millenium C.E, survived through the Dark Ages, was re-kindled during the Renaissance, and eventually became Rationalism, the base philosophies of Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant in the 17th and 18th centuries.

I ate all of this up, seeing it as the most logical explanation of the experience I'd had. And not only was this idea common- it was a major historical, philosophical, and scientific movement. Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Liebniz and Kant joined Pythagoras as my new league of patron saints. I read everything by them I could find, and even if I had NO IDEA what they were talking about, I was elated to read through and try to decipher them.

In the Fall of 2008, a full year after my first harmonic experience, my renewed interest in popular science led me to WNYC's Radiolab, a science-centric public radio show that "isn't afraid to ask the big questions". I downloaded podcasts about Time, Sleep, Music, Memory, Laughter, and Stress. But the one that really stood out from the rest was one called "Emergence". I'd never heard the term before used to describe a scientific phenomena, but the implications of Emergence really knocked my socks off. The first part of the episode was interview with a man named Steve Strogatz, a mathematics professor from Cornell University, who discussed how fireflies in certain parts of the world were able to somehow blink in synchrony, rather than the random on and off patterns those of us who have seen fireflies in North America are used to.

As the show progressed, the hosts described more and more examples group behaviors within nature that seemed to "emerge" spontaneously from the bottom up, rather than being commanded by some top-down over arching authority. They were like armies without generals. This podcast so profoundly interested me, it diverted me from my other studies of science and philosophy I had going on at the time. Eventually I discovered that Professor Strogatz had not only written an entire book on this spontaneous synchrony, but he had also just released a Teaching Company class on a field that tied in closely to emergent phenomena: Chaos Theory. (for more on my experience with Chaos and Emergence, please refer to my Chaos blog post)

I immediately bought the lectures on Chaos and completed the whole course in only two and a half weeks time. What I derived most from the course was a thorough analysis of various complex phenomena in our ever-noisy world, and the sense that within this seemingly chaotic behavior, discernible patterns tended to emerge. However, in chaos math, as the numbers of variables that describe this behavior increases, the system quickly becomes too complex to follow.

I slowly came to the realization that the natural world in general was far more complex that I had imagined, and that even our most advanced mathematics seemed impotent in the face of such complexity. The champions of Rationalism believed that the universe was built out of more simple things than our senses allowed us to see, and only through the divine language of mathematics could we rationally discover the more essential world that was beyond our perception.

Over the previous months, having closely followed the history of science throughout the ages, and learned of the multiple failures of mathematics to describe the natural world, it became obvious to me that the rational and idealistic philosophies that I was using to support my "harmonic city" theory had quite a few nasty holes in them. Was the experience I'd had the result of inherent mathematical harmony in the universe, or was it something completely different and unrelated? I was leaning more towards the latter, but either way, Pythagoras didn't seem like as sage-like as I had originally believed he was. Whatever my experience was, if mathematics weren't the answer, I still felt strongly that it had something to do with music.

So I rounded out 2008 with a 48-lecture series by the zany Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music called "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music." Oddly enough, in the first lecture of the class, Professor Greenberg clearly made his opinion known, that music and mathematics were unresolvable. To him mathematics was mathematics, and music was music. They were very separate things that took place in different realms, and never the twain shall meet.

This dealt the final blow to Rationalism for me, at least in reference to my experience. I decided to set aside my metaphysical inquiries and just enjoy the class. It was nice to kick back and end the year with such a rewarding introduction to great musical composers like Liszt, Haydn, Brahms, Mahler and Verdi.

As 2008 drew to a close, I was disappointed that I hadn't found my answers, but in the process I had been armed with enough general philosophical and scientific knowledge to continue the journey in the coming year. I felt like any future explorations would be a decidedly more rigorous and educated confrontation of this complex world we live in. But nothing I had learned in the entire previous year could have prepared me for what came next...

posted by Polymathic Resonance at 10:08 PM 2 Comments

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Introduction to Becoming

I first heard about the concept of Becoming during my Intro to Greek Philosophy class nearly two years ago. Becoming was provided in contrast to the concept of Being, which has largely pervaded Western culture for the last 2500 years. Two of the famous Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers represented these two separate ideas- Parmenides (Being) and Heraclitus (Becoming).

Parmenides' view of Being posited that everything is static; a single, permanent, unchanging, fundamental reality. Being was favored by Socrates, followed by Plato and then Aristotle, through whom it was disseminated throughout the ages. It has been pondered, debated, challenged, and reaffirmed in its various forms by scientists, philosophers, linguists, and religious thinkers alike. Ultimately Being is the most common Western (and for a substantial portion, Eastern) view of reality. For example, the statement "The world IS" is a statement of the world as a being or thing. "I AM." "The chair IS." And so on.

Heraclitus championed an entirely opposite view, Becoming- or what has become more commonly referred to as Process Philosophy. As he saw it, everything in the universe was in an indeterminate state of flux - always changing - and that this change was inevitable and the only real constant. While Being saw reality as a series of objects and substances, goals and destinations, Becoming saw reality as dynamic, impermanent, chaotic, and ceaseless.

Becoming weaved its way throughout the ages, in parallel to Being in Western culture, but always in the shadows. It eventually became the favored philosophy of such figures as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead. Many of them referred back to Heraclitus as their primary influence for this idea, especially Nietzsche.

Over the last two years, having come across this philosophy again and again in the various classes I've taken, or books I've delved into, I've been able to recognize my own process of Becoming. To ask the question "Becoming WHAT?" is to miss the point, and simply exposes our cultural, psychological, possibly even religious marriage to the concept of Being. Nietzsche built upon Heraclitus's assertion of Becoming, saying that we should view this inherent change throughout our lives, not as a difficulty to struggle against, or something set out to weaken us, but something we should embrace and use as a means to become more powerful individuals. Each change is not a detriment, but a meaningful progression of who we are.

So here I will recount for you, in several installments over the next month or so, what has become my great philosophical, scientific, and spiritual journey of the last two years. A question of how to better explain my day-to-day human experiences in more meaningful terms launched a series of encounters that have completely changed the way that I look at the world and my life.

I hope you enjoy!

posted by Polymathic Resonance at 9:26 PM 2 Comments

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Leonardo da Vinci: Scientific Revolutionary?


Leonardo da Vinci was not only the most influential painter and draftsman of the Renaissance, he defined science in an age in which it couldn't be properly conceived of or appreciated. His meticulous analysis and understanding of natural phenomena is paralleled only by the most cutting edge fields of 21st century modern science. So it begs the question- if Leonardo was as prolific a scientist as he was an artist, why was his artistic influence felt so strongly throughout the last 500 years while his science was not? The fascinating book The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra (author of The Tao of Physics) attempts to answer these questions.

Leonardo was a polymath, or what came to be known as a "Renaissance Man". In fact, his legacy defined the word- if you go to Wikipedia, his famous self portrait (pictured above) adorns the top of the page. Being a polymath is less an aspiration or a mode of operation- it's more like a psychological condition, bordering on obsession. But unlike many obsessions, instead of fixating on one specific thing, the affected mind goes in a million different directions at once, almost to a detriment (oil became Leonardo's preferred painting medium because it was the only medium that could stay wet long enough to tolerate all of his long-term noodling) Fortunately, Leonardo had wealthy and powerful clients during his career as a painter- religious, political, even the royal elite- who would provide him with money, workspace, and resources to freely pursue his varied passions. He had an entourage that followed him everywhere he went, and a constant team of assistants, so that he could maximize the breadth of his activities.

Leonardo's approach to knowledge in general was a classical Aristotilean, empirical style- an exhaustive examination and documentation of natural phenomena. His experimentation within the widely varied disciplines of painting, architecture, engineering, mathematics, and the various sciences are evident to us through the detailed and comprehensive 6000 surviving pages of his original Notebooks. Sadly, an estimated 7000 additional pages have been lost. In the Notebooks, he muses, sketches, and intuits the science, above and beyond the age of the Enlightenment, at least a hundred years before René Descartes, Sir Issac Newton, and their contemporaries had stepped foot on the planet.

Capra writes regarding Leonardo's tutoring of King François I of France:
"He never tired of hearing Leonardo explain to him the subtleties of his science of living forms- the complexities of turbulent water and air, the formation of rocks and the origin of fossils, the intricacies of human movement and the flight of birds, the nature of light and perspective, the canons of beauty and proportion, the pathways of the senses and the vital spirits that sustain our life, and the origin of human will and power in the seat of the soul." (Capra, p. 127)

Just in this small cross section we can clearly identify Leonardo's knowledge in fields we would call (respectively) Fluid and Aerodynamics, Geology, Paleontology, Biomechanics, Optics, Aesthetics, Anatomy and Psychology. Keep in mind all of these studies subsisted with only the simplest of technology, without the tools that were available when they were popularly developed. The analysis of Fluid Dynamics was especially difficult without advanced equipment, but it was of such acute interest to Leonardo that it yielded an abundance of pages in the Notebooks. It wasn't seriously pursued by the greater scientific community until the 19th century.


Leonardo is of course best known for his artistic endeavors, including several pioneering master paintings (The Last Supper, John The Baptist, and Mona Lisa), as well as the detailed drawings that can be found throughout his notebooks. He discovered that a more pleasing and striking image could be composed using harmonic proportion and perspective, rather than idealizing human and natural forms. So the endless hours he spent studying the underlying structure of these forms were inordinately beneficial to his artwork, whether they were rocks, streams of running water, or systems of muscles and organs throughout the human body. He felt if an artist didn't have a thorough enough understanding of natural forms, there was no way he could make a true and accurate rendering of them. Dedication to this principle set Leonardo apart from the other artists of his day, and galvanized (while it was actually a revival of ancient techniques) a revolution in the naturalism of painting. Many of the drawings in his Notebooks are still considered impressively accurate portrayals of human anatomy.


So why wasn't he received as successfully in the scientific community as he was in the art world? As Capra explains it, Leonardo never had a formal education, and though he did eventually teach himself Latin, the text in his Notebooks were written in common Italian, making him unable to garner much respect from many of the academic communities of the time. Additionally, his Notebooks weren't properly published until hundreds of years after his death. At that point, the modern scientific method as we know it had been established. The purely reductionist science that emerged from the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries analyzed organisms and natural phenomena by deferring their causes to the activities of lower level, component parts (molecules, atoms, particles, etc).

This was much different than Leonardo's methods, which were more holistic. Holistic examination to Leonardo was to observe a subject as it existed in context, emphasizing the connectedness of each part to its fellow component parts. Those collections would interact and form a system- a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. For example, it wouldn't make sense to analyze a single muscle in the upper arm of a human subject; you would have to see how it fit in context with all of the other muscles surrounding it, as well as the tendons that connected them to the bones of the elbow and shoulder and made the arm operational. His drawing Vitruvian Man celebrates the symmetry, proportion, and beauty of the human body as a whole.


Concurrently Leonardo was one of the first figures of history who believed that the types of natural phenomena seen everywhere on Earth extended throughout the cosmos, and that the planets outside the bounds of Earth were just as imperfect, noisy and complex as the nature that surrounded us. This stood in stark contrast to the widely accepted, even religiously mandated Aristotelian vision, which professed that the celestial bodies were constructed from the flawless, idealized, and mathematically perfect geometric forms of his teacher, Plato. Leonardo went further to postulate that the human body, the planet Earth, and the cosmos as a whole were macro/microcosms of each other, meaning that each was its own complex natural organism that reflected the other. Had Leonardo access to a powerful microscope at that point and observed the various discrete cellular systems within the human body, he might have gone further to recognize them as the next step down in his picture of reality. His vision offers not only a more expansive view of reductionist science, but goes further to exemplify nonlinear, fractal-like geometry in self-similar complex systems. This type of research didn't become popular until the late 20th century, a full 500 years after Leonardo had passed away. In fact, this division of his studies could also easily be compared to systems biology, complexity, and cognitive science- some of the most cutting-edge fields of research today.

Leonardo's scientific endeavors were a product of his own vigorous, private self-education. However, exercising his polymathic sensibilities, he was able to meld art and science together as one, and include scientific inquiry as a fundamental part of the art-making process. That way he was never forced into a situation where the scientific work had to be separately approved, funded, or even known about by anyone but his closest associates. Without economic, social, or religious interests directly tied to it, Leonardo seized the opportunity to explore interests for their own sake, rather than having to cater to the desires of any particular patron. Most research scientists today have to constantly deal with these obstacles and keep the interests of their funders (drug companies, national defense departments, academic institutions) in mind at all times as they perform their experiments.

Of course Leonardo had a relatively stable, well-paying career, with a solid base of political and religious clients who happily praised and generously supported his artistry, allowing him the time and flexibility to employ such a thorough methodology. He never had to worry about having food to eat or a place to live. But while few of us in the modern day can revel in the types of luxuries he enjoyed, we can still view, understand and appreciate the value of independent scientific research and studying the wonders of the natural world, on our own, for it's own sake, the discoveries themselves becoming their own rewards.

Imagine what our world could have been like had Leonardo's Notebooks been the cornerstone of the Enlightenment. How would the world be different? What if we all stopped whatever we were doing every day, just to watch the sunset? What if everyone learned a musical instrument, and set aside time to play every day, just for themselves? What if we all spoke ten languages? What if every city building had a rooftop garden, that the residents of the building personally cared for and took pride in? What if math class was absolutely fascinating, because we actually understood the context of it and how it fit into our daily lives instead of being presented with steady streams of abstract concepts? What if each and every one of us was in constant awe and wonder at the simple idea of being alive?

If we followed a path inspired by Leonardo the Scientist, the Naturalist, the Polymath, the Self-Educated, tireless Seeker of Knowledge- the Visionary- all of these things might be possible. If we could only view the natural world through his eyes, with as much appreciation and sense of awe as he had for the sheer complexity of it all... we certainly wouldn't ever have to think twice about saving it.

posted by Polymathic Resonance at 12:31 PM 1 Comments

Sunday, March 22, 2009

The School of Athens

I've taken quite a few detours over the last few months, for a variety of reasons. But now that I've committed myself wholeheartedly to following whatever philosophical or scientific whim blows through the room, I've ended up in some pretty mind blowing places. It's always nice to be surprised about the nature of things- things you had taken completely for granted, oftentimes through word of mouth. But when they are more closely scrutinized, the proverbial rug ends up being pulled out from under you.

Now that I've spent a lot of time with the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, I realize that it is possible to inquire on all things, and though it may be hard to stomach, there might not be an actual answer to said inquiry. For every "concrete" view, there is one that's set to the polar opposite, for a reason that could very well be more astounding than the first. Instead of painting the world with a black and white, good and evil, "with us or against us" brush, it's instead composed in shades of gray and uncertainty. The truth is therefore defined by the argument itself, in the absence of an actual conclusion. According to Plato, this kind of result, while wholly unsatisfying, works just fine.

Aristotle, the star pupil of Plato, felt this methodology was a cop out, and that it was his duty to put a cap on these types of inquiries, in order to make any kind of progress in what was then called "natural philosophy." Every question you could pose had an answer- you just had to go out into the world, study natural phenomena, and arrive at that answer, empirically as it were. Though you can look back and chuckle at what may seem like naive and voluminous writings on the nature of politics, ethics, the cosmos, biology, poetry, etc, Aristotle's method of inquiry for the most part remains the same accepted method that the scientific community uses today. Theories of hard science can't be proven through reason and discussion alone. Someone can't just publish a scientific paper in a major journal with no data to back up their claim. For example, someone could rationalize that clouds exist because little invisible gnomes with paint brushes shuttle across the sky and create them. If you were to claim something like this, contrary to every notion we accept about meteorology, you had better damn well have some strong empirical/collected data that proves such a claim. And even then, it's still just a "theory," right?

It's well substantiated throughout history that even a proven theory may well be refuted just because it isn't supported within the ideology of the common culture. Take heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice-versa, or atomic theory, postulating that all things in existence can be broken down into more basic, tiny components. Both were out and out rejected in their own times, over and over again, simply because the culture of the day refused to accept it. Even today's debates about evolution vs. intelligent design fall solidly into this category, though it's pretty obvious that the evolutionists have largely been accepted as the "winner" in this "contest". Through the mountains of data Charles Darwin and innumerable other scientists have collected, evolution is the accepted nature of existence of humankind- it's the ANSWER. Thus Aristotle lives on.

So what happens if the "answer" is eventually proven wrong? What about travesties of the the past like Witch Trials, where suspected citizens were subjected to the full gambit of "scientific tests" before they were convicted and burned alive? What about blood-letting as a method for suppressing disease or haphazard brain surgery in an attempt to cure mental disorders? How can we know that the things we hold as truths one moment won't vaporize in the next?

The truth: we can't. We can't account for the horrible things we've done in the past in the name of science. Technology only improves with time, and while one day we can't analyze a drop of blood at a murder scene, the next we have DNA testing, sending a convicted murderer with a 30 year prison sentence home after having been wrongly imprisoned for 13 years- for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Like it or not, this is just the nature of science in our world. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our lives, to become more efficient, to live longer, and to feel better- by fumbling through the darkness to find a more harmonious explanation for the things around us. We try to cobble these ideas and data together, and continually pretend that we can somehow grab nature by the horns using these flawed Aristotelian endeavors.

So why do we continue to rely on a 2300 year old method that's inherently riddled with error? Because the benefits of doing so largely outweigh the detriments. Through science, we can propose and live by these fake, temporary "universal truths" quite well, even if they turn out to cause major catastrophes later on. As my Superstring Theory professor said- "science is always right - until it's wrong."

Interestingly enough, the overarching method of battling scientific ideas returns to the form of a perpetual dialectic; an argument or conversation that goes back and forth endlessly, refining our body of scientific knowledge again and again. I can't help but see the irony of this- that the format is a lot like- a Platonic dialogue. So really our methods of scientific inquiry are a hybrid of the philosophies both of Plato AND Aristotle. Neither is mutually exclusive. Perhaps this is why in Rafael's painting, The School of Athens, standing in the center of of a collection of ancient Western philosophical figureheads, is both Plato and Aristotle, their respective doctrines tucked under one arm, while gesturing with the other their opposing viewpoints. Plato points up to the heavens, to indicate the source of universal truth, as if to say "Only God knows," while Aristotle holds his hand out in front of him, as if to say "Everything we can know is right here in front of us." I don't know about you, but I find it thoroughly amusing that the foundations of Western culture seem to rest entirely on these base opposing principles. Instead of agreeing completely with one or another viewpoint, we create harmony out of conflict, rather than out of equilibrium.

It doesn't seem quite right at face value, does it? Yet somehow it works. Maybe the philosopher Diogenes, who lived at the time of Plato and Aristotle, and who was a champion of the writings of my old pal Heraclitus, said it best:

"All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream."

The world and all that we know is just a river of chaos. Hope you wore your life vest.

posted by Polymathic Resonance at 9:34 PM 2 Comments