Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

I cannot tell you how great it feels to get the end of the story out of the way. It's on the blog, but i didn't actually publish it here on facebook. Now we can just keep filling in random middle parts. Like mid 90s funk rock. You probably know 1 or 2 songs by Spin Doctors, but they aren't on their second album Turn It Upside Down. You probably didn't know John Popper was an early member (prior to their name change).  Spin Doctors is a jam band. I don't mean that in a bad way, i just mean you have to take them completely on their own terms because there isn't any larger statement they try to make than "hi, we're a band, hope you came here to hear some random funky rock songs about drug euphamisms." Dirt means heroin, by the way. Especially if it's in a bag. Ok, normally i don't like this album, but today it's totally fine. It could just be that finishing the  story is a big mental relief, but probably anything sounds a little more chipp...

 The political compass is a Klein Bottle.

Everybody here now? Ok, analysis is a tricky thing. For one, you have to have a goal. That goal could be tiny, like when we tried to figure out what order makes the tracks actually mean something. The brackets helped a lot, because they outlined the context of a performance: there's a rehearsal, a premier, and an ordered sequence of scenes. Whatever it is we're hearing, it's being performed for an audience. Now we can proceed to the actual stuff being performed. As far as i can tell, there are only two participants. There's an entity that says "me," and an entity that says "we." I'm skipping over the fact that it morphs from "me" to "we," the important part is that it says "we are the Voice of Trespass." Voice of Tresspass is a corporate (plural) entity. I don't think we have to delve too deep into it, they explicity call themselves evil, and equally explicitly take advantage of the protagonist. Actually, they ar...

[Day 2] Bottle awoke with a stuffy nose, and a general desire to not do anything. Though he longed for nothing so much as to go back to blissful sleep, he nevertheless conquered the invisible force that pinned him to the bed, and as they say, put on pants. Onward, he goes.  [Voice of Bottle] Millions, according to the conceptual timeline, is the first song. We have to try to understand it, but you're not gonna like how much grammatical analysis it's gonna take. Oh well.  Millions of something flying overhead. Birds, UFOs, cans of peaches, Professor Xavier's room with all the psychic weblinks to people's brains, people watching The Truman Show, owls, spy satellites, i don't know. Way too many to count, is the point. He wants to be back up there with them, but they are flying away without him. Whatever they are, he feels like they have abandoned him and he's scared, possibly cold. That might seem like barely a fragment of an idea, but it is a coherent framework fo...

First thing's first (it's like step 9 by now, but who's counting?), we need a list of chronological (for us) vs in order (for the story).  1. Condemned to the gallows [night 1] 2. House organ [day 2] 3. Yellow eyes [night 4/morning 5] 4. Millions [before] 5. Gold distance  6. Blot [rehersal] 7. The proverbial bellow [night 6] 8. Glide [night 4] 9. Voice of tresspass  10. The grid [the premier]  Now, there's definitely some wiggle room here, but if i were going to rearrange those tracks in order of the story time line, it would be this:  4, 6, 10, 1, 2, 3.1, 8, 3.2, 7  Sure, the dreams actually took place before they were broadcast, but the story is about the actual broadcasting of these dreams. Tracks 5 and 9 aren't given a sequential reference, and that's because they are musical nouns. Whatever the "gold distance" is, it's the purely musical track 5, and track 9 is a character study of "voice of tresspass." Tommy already told us it'...

Some preliminary points:  1) i was hoping this would be the case, and it is: the whole thing is out of order. Thank goodness i've built my entire writing style around that theme. You're welcome.  2) we have some proper nouns, and the band's minimalist user manual to work from. There is a protagonist. There is a corporation. Dreams are involved. Various songs share various words. I'm not saying it can't be bad, but i am saying there's every possible chance it will be good.  3) these two albums are an actual puzzle for us to figure out. We get to use spreadsheets, draw arrow diagrams, type random things into the googlemafetchbox, it's like a structuralist scavenger hunt made of cardboard and plumbing pipes.  4) you can cheat and buy Tommy's actual book about these albums for $25 on sheet happens dot com. You can also buy my book of album reviews for the same price without the extra cost of shipping. Who's more interesting? Tommy, obviously, but that...

"It's here, it's here! Now we can get to the bottom of this Automata thing." Three heads simultaneously jerked up from their computers, with matching left eye squints and nose crinkles. After several eternities of awkward silence, Sandra remarked with the delicate meekness of a 19th-century English orphan in some dismal London rookery. "Oh, Bottle. Please, no. We would gladly listen to the wood chipper again, if it pleases you." "Whaaa, with an emphatic interrobang," replied Bottle. "What have you got against Between the Buried and Me? They're great. I suppose this particular concept might turn out to be nonsense, but the music is awesome. You just hate the death growls that much?" "Yes. It is a stench upon the nose of our ears most foul." "It's supposed to be horrible. I talked about that way back with Black Dahlia Murder. Ok, what if i put it this way? The parts where Tommy actually sings, what do those do for you...

How have we not listened to The Presidents of the United States of America? The band, i mean. They made 6 albums, but i only care about their self titled debut. They were originally a punk rock busker duo whose schtick came from Sandman, a series of graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. No, i'm being told it was Mark Sandman, the frontman of Morphine. Morphine was one of those super famous and influential bands no one ever heard on commercial radio. Regardless, the gist is that you take one guitar and fit it with two bass strings, and another guitar and fit it with the 3 thickest guage guitar strings you can find. Tune it all down to C# so you have essentially one 5-string bass, write songs about the most mundane topics possible, and eventually hire a drummer. It's the 90s so you got Smurfs, obscure regional supermarkets, getting scratched by your cat, finding your pet lizard dead under the furniture, a dune buggy, and canned peaches. Oh, and an MC5 cover. Realistically, nobody wants ...

You know, if at times my nonsense rhymes, then i'll stand trial. It's certainly true that i sat me down to tell a simple story, but my goodness the places we've explored. I thought it might be interesting to go way back near the beginning. No, not Vanilla Fudge, i was thinking of A Salty Dog by Procol Harum. As i recall, i didn't have much to say because it's lovely. I was also just clumsily starting to write the story i sat me down to write, so where the devil did that suggestion come from? Where's Narray, the Metatron, the Mouth of my subconscious Sauron? Nowhere? Ok, guess i'll wing it. I don't have any proof, but i suspect it's that the actual dream in BTBAM's Automata is supposedly about finding his family and returning home. This album is clearly the first half of that process, sailing off and finding yourself in the middle of the journey. There's a fair bit of garbage amateur musicology about this album, critical blather as i call it. ...

Album review, meandering post-structural inquiry, both, or neither? Choices, choices... ... both it is! Problem solving is a narrative structure that involves 3 components. 1) the application of a good/bad dichotomy and a classification as "bad"; 2) the application of learned strategies and consequences to flip that classification to "good"; and 3) the observation or affirmation that the dichotomy has been resolved.  We need an example.  I want to place things on a table, and i want them to stay on the table. Every time i place something on the table it moves to the other side, falls off the edge, and shatters. That entire gestalt is an identifiable problem, i need to apply some action to prevent it, and observe to my satisfaction that it has been prevented for future repetitions.  In order to do that, we have to step inside the system and analyze its component parts. Thus, we have to define what is or is not a component. We could make a list of all the component ac...

So, games 1 and 2 were basic money lending games. Game 1, though simple to follow, was actually a sloppy nightmare behind the scenes. Paul always made 57 and Bottle always made 11. Bottle could make a million dollars, but Paul would always make 5+ times more.  Game 2, much more difficult to follow on paper, was actually a very simple interest plan. Paul wanted a fixed rate of return, which in turn capped Paul's profit and resulted in a gradual transfer of liability. Each round cost less for Paul, so he made less profit, until Bottle didn't need Paul's money anymore.  Now though, i have to try to show you a simple compound interest game. I don't mind saying that's much tougher. We have to know how compound interest works, and we have to place that formula in an actual real world context. Let's give it a shot.  The formula for compound interest is:  P (1 + r/n)^(nt), where P is the initial principal balance, r is the interest rate, n is the number of times interes...

Hello, you can call me Narry. Bottle was doing a really good job of following the exchanges of money in publishing his book, but wandered into the wild web of complexity that trying to predict the structural consequences of choice weaves. As you astute readers might have guessed, he accidentally reverted to normal people thinking, and Carl is currently sweeping him back up into an old snowshovel for Chriscrosstopher Robin to reassemble.  After 26 books, Paul had $50, Bottle had 12 cents. What happened after that was that Bottle forgot what the rules of the game were, lost track of how many books he had or hadn't sold, and got bit by the cat because he looked into the box at too many random times for no reason. That's what people do all the time in the real world, and it's nonsensical gibberish.  We need to understand the rules if we want to see what happens. From that 50/.12 split, Paul agrees to buy each new crate for $143 if Bottle agrees to pay him $200 after he sells al...

Welcome back! Let's try to untangle Bottle's thoughts from yesterday.  For this first game, we'll remove the real variation of the first case, and look at an ideal simple exchange. Each case costs 143, and returns 211. We can watch Bottle's account go up and down like this.  0 211 68 279 136 347 ... and so on.  Seeing how Paul's account changes is a little more complicated. First, we need to watch how the negatives accumulate. Remember, Paul is paying the difference whenever Bottle falls below 143.  0 -143 143 - 65 = -75 143 - 136 = - 7 0  This is what Bottle thinks Paul actually pays each time he buys a case of books. In all he pays 225. Unfortunately, it's nonsensical gibberish. The numbers don't actually look like that when we combine them. We need to look at how Bottle might pay back this investment. We could play all sorts of games here, but let's say Paul wants a 25% return on each purchase.  143 x .25 = 35.75  Paul wants 178.75 for the first cas...

So, back to the starting point for the continuation. Paul has $250, Bottle has $0.12 and 2 books. Let's say he sells those books plus 9 more out of nowhere. Bottle needs to order another 14, but he only has $30.36. He needs 143 - 30.36 = 112.64 to get them.  This is only one of many possible continuations, by the way. Bottle really could call it quits, Paul could be done investing, Bottle could have kept going without actually paying Paul back yet, you get the idea. This chain of choices splinters off into an infinitely complex web of possibilities at every singly point. For this thought experiment we're closing out every transaction, and i'm intentionally steering toward succeeding. Bottle might not sell any more books at all, or Paul might get tricky with his lending schemes, or a tornado might roll through. Anything could happen. We waved bye-bye to actual reality quite a while ago.  Paul, the nice guys that he is, says same deal, he'll pay the 143 but he wants back ...

So in the spirit of Spirit revolving and weaving itself through the whole tapestry of the first book, hello David Bowie's first album. All those little lonely people trying to navigate a big scary complicated uncaring world of other people's realities.  It's a favorite saying that the poor can't become wealthy by taking away the wealth of the wealthy, but it's also a favorite saying that you can't make money by dividing money, and everyone should have to work for their wealth. I can't hold all that cognitive dissonance in my head for very long without screaming at people that they are thinking like morons. I showed you exactly why that's the mirror image of tangible reality with my own real life money, and i went into great detail about the difficulty of actually keeping track of which function corresponds to which agent, and how sloppy thinking creeps in at every possible moment. Each one of those statements is perfectly logical thinking in isolation, b...

I don't know anything about Villainy. That cover art screams foreign extreme metal, though. Opening it up, i see the very first lyrics are "when the structure is done...."  Total coincidence that this is the penultimate album before the out-of-nowhere random record that magically ties the whole thing together in my mind. Your milage may vary, but i'm highly attuned to the shape and feel of an unfolding process. It's an illusion our brains create to navigate the constant bombardment of stimuli. It's one of many doorways into the wild west of Gestalt Psychology (see how The Mopes just travelled right along with us?). It's the opposite of Structuralism in some ways, arguing that we percieve larger patterns and cycles all at once, rather than assembling meaning from individual components. It's where the idiom "the whole is greater than its parts" comes from. I, of course, have been doing both at the same time, constantly flipping back and forth, ...

Look, Bottle. As the narrator, i know that you're exasperated, but you can't fly off on a subtley humorous tangent related to the lyrical content of an album as it interacts with your secondary subject. The reader can't follow it.  Yes i can. I've been doing it the whole time. My imaginary reader can follow it. This isn't light, diversionary, casual reading. This is heavy, intricate philosophical investigation type stuff, albeit framed in the silly context of hiding in the basement listening to my rapidly growing record collection while leaving out a lot of the big words and jargon. Illustrations of the subject, rather than dry boring op-ed rants in the Sunday paper. I prefaced the whole project that way. Two years ago i said i was showing everyone how to do it, how to interpret real life, you just have to understand that you're along for the ride on my bus, and i don't have a map or route to follow. I apologized for hating some albums, said i don't know...

No, you know what, Mr. Narrator? I don't have to follow your rules. I can do another album if i feel like it. Call me Happy David Gilmour, 'cause i'm not feeling lazy anymore. Have you ever wished that there were such a thing as catchy frantic pop-punk buoyed by electronic gobbledygook instead of power chord chugging and strumming? Jangly guitar melodies with total drum and distortion cacophony behind them? A Devo/Merzbow collab? Well, i've got Parts & Labor's Mapmaker from 2007. I'd say their brand of noise rock is pretty close. It might be the only good album i've heard from the decade of the naughts. What does that have to do with the price of cheese, i mean higher education? I don't know. Nothing. I mean, we were talking about real people vs corporate functions, trying to understand why it's so hard to keep track of the real cost of living in a technologically advanced society, how the little guys and gals get swept aside for the sake of not ...

When last we saw Bottle, he was showing us how his investor made $50, but he made 12 cents. He then walked away, because shoveling chicken shit was a more productive use of his time and energy than being a businesspeople.  We know that Bottle and Paul and all the rest are the same person, we know that this is a structural sandbox, but Bottle is a decently smart chap. He's showing us the underlying structure of American business, and how the rich get richer/poor struggle to break even without anyone taking any advantage of anyone else. The structure itself causes this problem, even when the people involved are the nicest, sweetest, good intentioned people imaginable.  He'll come back tomorrow with more records, but even a well functioning narrator such as myself can't possibly know what words will come out of his mouth, or what record will be playing while he says them. It is an adventure, after all. So as Bottle might say, catch you on the flip side, and cheers. Next

Let's travel through the mirror and look at it from the inside, show you what happens when you step through reality into the Imaginarium. Don't worry, the escalator of doom knows the difference, and you can ride right back up it when we're done.  We need a soundtrack, though. Well, would you look at that, i have the Cruise Deal EP by Mirror Travel. Pouty post-punk on a pretty sea-foam platter. Poyfect.  Hi, i'm Bottle, welcome to my media empire. I am a publisher. I publish music, videos, and books. In terms of actual work, i get the material, make sure it looks and/or tastes the way i want it to, then shove it in the innertubenetweb and go do something else. I have some big advantages, like no employees to pay, buildings to rent, licenses or fees, we call that stuff overhead. I let all that stuff sail over my head; we're in the basement, after all. Sure, i have corporate functions like any other schmuck (you've met Sandra and Skip and Gladys and Compilerson and...

If you feel like i'm just going Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, don't make me a target. I love Spoon. Now i can add their 6th album to my collection.  Did you know Pete Loeffler is surprised and frustrated by the fact that Chavelle doesn't make any money from album sales? Why is he surprised by that? Pete isn't selling those records. They aren't Pete's records, they aren't Chavelle's records, they are Sony's records. The band signed away their profits for global distribution. It's one thing to understand what your contract says, it's another thing to understand what it means and decide what you really want. In the case of a major label, it invariably means you created a work for hire. Dear Pete, Epic bought your album with Sony's money, hope you negotiated enough of an advance to live until the next one.  I know what's happening in Pete's head. He thinks that fans are buying his albums and he'll get some portion of that money. That's not ...

Runaway compound interest is stretching the definition of a Giffen good a bit, but it's certainly true that i have to devote more and more of my paycheck to it as the balance keeps rising. At some point, it will overtake 100% of my potential future earnings, and theoretically zoom off to infinity. Who gets the blame is somewhat immaterial, the point is that someone with authority has to physically put a stop to it.  So, how do we solve it? First, the compound interest has to permenently stop compounding. Congress and the next few Presidents can't keep changing their minds every time it rises to the top of the agenda. Set some criteria, set up a payoff plan, and make a legitimate end point. Stop speculating on my unpayable debt, and properly budget what i CAN pay.  Second, realize that Universities are not an acceptable substitute for skills training, they are communities and repositories of knowledge and philosophy. Apprenticeships and professional training are important, but ...

Ok, i sort of get it. I can see how you're stuck in limbo. But, we can't reaarange the entire economy to pay off your debt, even if you represent a wider demographic.  That's where you go wrong. I'm not a demographic. I'm 1 person, being selfish. I can't pay it, but i'm also perfectly willing to not even try. I make enough money to live a comfortable life, and the promise of possible fortune has no power over me. All i have to do is make an annoying phone call every once in a while to explain reality to a 20-something collections agent. She types in my numbers, sees that they are exactly what the irs report says they are, and slumps down in her chair because she isn't legally allowed to take away my grocery money. I'm paying more than the maximum federal wage garnishment. I'm exceedingly tired of playing that game, so instead i'll play some adult contemporary progressive death metal. I'm not thrilled that it's remixed/mastered, but i ...

Geez, Bottle. Where did that doom and gloom in last night's album review come from? Glad you asked. We have money now, right? But, by and large, we're all stuck in various vicious cycles of buying Giffen goods. What the hell are Giffen goods? That's where the price of things you have to have to function inflate for normal reasons, but you and everyone else still needs to buy them so they keep inflating, and because they are inflating even more people start buying them as "investments," so everything actually gets worse. Think Irish potato famine, or the housing bubble, or the recent weather related hyperinflation of natural gas in Texas. My problem is repaying my student loan debt, but i'm well past the moral crisis stage, and congress isn't addressing the lack of lender responsibility that bankruptcy is supposed to ameliorate, they just aren't collecting on it at all. I've been bankrupt for my decade, but that 6 digit monolith is still not crumbli...