Attended my third wedding in two months this past weekend. This time it was cousin Lorelei in Colorado Springs. Of the three weddings this was the best, particularly in terms of the ceremony. A nice blend of length, humor, and of course dogs. Both Lorelei and Morgan are dog people and Lorelei has had her dog, Nordic, since he was a puppy. Thus, it was fitting that Nordic and Jake (Morgan's dog) loped down the aisle after the bridesmaids came down. The minister, unaware this was going to happen (I think...), was quite pleased and excited by this particular injection of personality into the service. There were a couple of flubbed lines by the participants, but they got a good-natured chuckle from the audience. Morgan and Lorelei wrote their own separate vows and they were very good. Finally, at the end of the ceremony Lorelei was given permission to "kiss the groom," a turnabout that I thought was really neat.

Pictures are up on the .Mac Photos site (the link is over on the right side of this page, in the "Links" section. Over there ⇒). 

Just about to leave for the airport to fly to Denver (and then on to Colorado Springs) for cousin Lorelei's wedding. I had figured I could catch up on sleep on the plane because the marine layer of clouds over L.A. would take away anything to see.

Wrong. High winds have come in over the last couple of hours and it's clear as a bell now. Should be plenty to see. Ah well! 

One of the advantages of unemployment is the ability for long weekends and meandering drives. Certainly I'm particularly happy to partake in the second of those two things. Since Rhonelle was attending an MLA conference in San Jose I took the opportunity to drive up there and pick her up (she took the ACE train in from Stockton that morning). Moreover, I took the opportunity to drive the length of CA 25 and finally visit San Benito County. I've now visited, in some form or other, every county in California, though I need to return to the north-central counties to properly acknowledge them (Cecilia knows what I mean...).

San Benito is a very rural county, partitioned from the eastern portion of Monterey county in 1874. Its county seat is Hollister and that city is by far the largest city in the county. CA 25 runs the length of the county (right through the middle), so driving the length of CA 25 gives you a good introduction to the sweeping treeless hills and abundance of cattle there. San Benito will also stand in my memory as the county of the Suicidal Squirrel Battalions. Several times on the route bunches of squirrels (or single suicidal squirrels) would race across the road in front of my car, dashing just out of reach of the wheels rolling along at around 70 mph. Most of the squirrels survived.

Yes, most of the squirrels survived. One poor soul didn't quite make it, as the distinctive thump and quivering rodent in the rearview mirror make cringingly clear. Yikes...

Rain in San Jose, but the library where I picked up Rhonelle was really stunning. The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library is brand new and serves both CSUSJ and the city of San Jose. It features several art installation-type things as well as housing the Beethoven Center. Within the Beethoven Center is a lock of Beethoven's hair. Yes, when the old man died in 1827 two locks of his hair were cut off for posterity and one of them wound up in San Jose of all places. Quite amazing to see actually, and considering that the AMS meeting was that same weekend in Houston I figured that viewing Beethoven's hair was as good of a musicological substitute as I was going to get. Strolled around downtown San Jose looking for someplace nice to eat but we ended up settling for Gordon Biersch, one of those casual and trendy brewpubs that have sprung up in the last ten years or so to accompany the popularity of microbreweries and "independent" beers. Decent food, but very loud restaurant.

Sunday Rhonelle and I drove up into the Sierra foothills to revisit the Marshall Gold Discovery SHP in Coloma. We had visited the park briefly in 2002 as part of our trip along the length of CA 49, but this time we had all day to wander around. Very nice place. James Marshall, the man who found the gold in 1848, is accorded a very prestigious place in the park obviously. Interestingly, he never really made any wealth from his discovery and actually died quite destitute (same for John Sutter, owner of the sawmill Marshall was working on when gold was found). More interestingly is the way Marshall is venerated as some sort of "discoverer," as some sort of hero, when his discovery really was an accident. In other words, Marshall wasn't prospecting, he was checking the progress of some work on the mill when his eye was caught by the gleam of what turned out to be gold. Heck, that could have happened to anyone. And yet it happened to James Marshall on January 27, 1848, and now he has a really big monument at a state park.

Driving back from Coloma we exited I-5 south of Sacramento and drove along CA 160, which winds its way along the Sacramento River. More than that, it winds its way across the top of several levees. Very picturesque to look out and see the mighty Sacramento River just feet away (23 feet below us). We got off the 160 at CA 12 in order to head back to I-5 and Stockton. Very pleasant drive though.

Pictures of this portion of the weekend.

The drive home to Los Angeles also included some impromptu diversions, in particular I cut across the valley along CA 152 to meet up with CA 99. With that diversion I've now driven the length of CA 152 (stretches from CA 99 to US 101 near Gilroy). Heading into Bakersfield I jumped on CA 58 to head east up over the Tehachapi Mountains. Extremely nice drive up to 4000 feet. Caught CA 14 south for the trip back down to L.A.

For those of you keeping score at home, here is the route I took from Los Angeles to Stockton:
(Los Angeles) I-405, I-5, CA 46, US 101, CA 198, CA 25, US 101, CA 85, CA 87 (San Jose), I-280, I-680, CA 84, I-580, I-205, I-5 (Stockton).

Coming back, the route was:
(Stockton) I-5, CA 152, CA 99, CA 58, CA 14, I-5, I-405 (Los Angeles). 

If you're a faithful reader here at PeteOfTheStreet Sayz you'll remember my great interest in the songwriting contest sponsored by Dream Theater. To recap: the band provided structural skeletons for a song on their upcoming album and asked fans to write a song using that skeleton. At the time, I was particularly interested in the semiotics of the skeleton, both in terms of the ambiguity of such terms as "BEATLES" and "CRIMSON" as well as in the way the finished entries would be every bit as "authoritative" as Dream Theater's version of the skeleton.

Well, last week Dream Theater's album Train of Thought was released and the world got hear for the first time their version of "Stream of Consciousness." It was pretty neat to listen to it because I really felt like I already knew it, having studied the "score" while listening to all the contest entries. To be sure, Dream Theater did not come up with the structural skeleton and then write musical content around that skeleton, but I couldn't help but hear their "Stream of Consciousness" in terms of its structure. Of course I paid great attention to the moments in the structure the band had marked with the semiotics (BEATLES, etc.), and I was surprised by the results of some of those areas in the song. For instance Dream Theater's "BEATLES" section sounds no more like a recognizable Beatles section than almost any of the contest entries. As I wrote in my first blog on this topic, most of the entries simply played the chords given in the skeleton, without a lot of fancy stuff. The results were usually quite a jarring contrast to the surrounding sections of music and, to my surprise, Dream Theater's version of the BEATLES section sounds like most of the contest entries'. In all cases there is not a lot that sounds to me like the Beatles enough to warrant labeling the section "BEATLES."

The contest winner won't be announced for at least another month. 

Fans of the alternative metal band Tool have to be some of the most curious and creative in rock. They are incredibly active interpreters of Tool's music and lyrics and are proud of their sense of intelligence as fans. Tool's aesthetic lends itself very well to wide ranging interpretation, dealing as it does with "alternative" views of inner consciousness, vaguely Buddhist spirituality, and other interesting philosophical inquiries such as the mutation of DNA and the concept of a Third Eye. In other words, these are not songs about your best girl and movies on a Saturday night. The band's music can best be described as drawing on the aggression and ensemble virtuosity of metal combined with the kind of tortured interiority that characterizes Radiohead's post-O.K. Computer music. Such a combination certainly sets them apart from many metal bands, and the centrality of their unusual lyrics only adds to the mystique of the band.

However, any previous interpretative theories by fans have been outdone by the recent focus on the notion that the entirety of Tool's most recent album, Lateralus, actually needs to be reordered in order to reveal a secret message dealing with moving through consciousness as a movement of along spirals: "Spiral out, keep going, spiral out" sings Maynard James Keenan toward the end of "Lateralus," the album's title track. Added to this is the tantalizing prospect that the album and its message are also influenced by the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. When plotted on a graph Fibonacci numbers form a spiral-like image. Moreover, the main riff in "Lateralus" is comprised of three different meters: 9/8, 8/8, 7/8, or: 987, which happens to be the sixteenth step in the Fibonacci sequence (as observed by Keenan himself during the writing of the song). Moreover, moreover (!), Keenan's halting vocal rhythms during the first verse of "Lateralus" correspond to Fibonacci numbers in their syllable counts:

1 (Black)
1 (then)
2 (white are)
3 (all I see)
5 (in my infancy)
8 (red and yellow then came to be)
5 (reaching out to me)
3 (lets me see)

Freaky, eh? Anyway, all this got one unknown fan to write up a big long post somewhere and to speculate that the actual order of the songs on Lateralus needed to be rearranged so as to reveal the "true" message of the album. Basically, the idea is this: Lateralus has 13 tracks (a Fibonacci number, BTW) so you place that track at the center of your new track order. The surrounding tracks are all grouped into pairs that sum the number 13 and spiraling in toward 13, then outward from it. Here's the suggested track arrangement with the two "spirals" in bold:

6, 7, 5, 8, 4, 9, 13, 1, 12, 2, 11, 3, 10

The unknown fan calls this arrangement The Holy Gift.

There are of course some "issues" with this arrangement. First, there's no explanation given for why we start with track 6. To be sure, track 6 and 7 on the album are very much a pair ("Parabol" and "Parabola," the second emerging from the first without a pause), so they should probably stick together, but why they start off things isn't really explained by the unknown fan. Also, if tracks 6 and 7 must stay together then why separate tracks 10, 11, and 12, three tracks originally conceived of by Tool as one very long song (the album artwork links these three songs visually as well)? The new arrangement also places the very strange "Faaip de Oiad" in the center of the collection. Not so much a song as a four-minute sound collage built around a supposedly real recording of an escaped Area 51 employee calling into a radio talkshow, "Faaip de Oiad" seems rather unusual at the apex of such a interpretively rich arrangement. But that's what makes this whole thing so intriguing: the entire Holy Gift arrangement is one giant interpretation, so it's not hard to continue the interpretation (as some fans already have) to be able to explain the prominent place of "Faaip de Oiad."

Is this whole thing just interpretation run amok? I think not.

After learning of the Holy Gift phenomenon, I re-ripped my copy of Lateralus, edited out the silences at the beginning and ending of each track (as advised by the unknown fan), and burned a copy of The Holy Gift. I have to say that I immediately liked the album more than before, and it's certainly entertaining to think about the alternate meaning as you listen. My enjoyment of the album increased though because the best songs (in my opinion) have fortuitously been grouped in the front half instead of being scattered across the album. The Holy Gift is in many ways a heavier album than Lateralus and the transition from one song to the next is interesting when there are no significant silences to "clear the palette." Of course, the new arrangement does make some of the shorter interludes stick out awkwardly (Tool is fond of these little soundscape interludes -- there are usually three or four of them on each album, designed, I assume, to provide a sense of large-scale contrast amidst the aggressive heavier songs that make up the bulk of the albums), but these interludes mostly occur in the second half of the new arrangement, as the original track numbers are spiraling outward, so perhaps there's something cosmic going on. Or perhaps not.

Finally, I have to say that the combination of the Holy Gift phenomenon, aided significantly as it is by digital audio technology, and the Dream Theater songwriting contest (also aided by digital technology, but in different ways) have me looking for conferences at which to present some ideas about these things. Indeed, both of these situations are very interesting think-pieces involving so many issues in popular music culture. If nothing else, I hope to feature them in my heavy metal class the next time I'm asked to teach it.

Here's Google's search result for "tool lateralus fibonacci". Just in case you wanted to explore the interpretative process yourself. 

Somehow I stumbled across Wikipedia today and spent most of the afternoon and evening exploring and contributing to it. For those of you who don't know about it, Wikipedia is basically an online encyclopedia except that there is no single authoritative organizing body to determine what gets put into the encyclopedia or how things are discussed. The idea is to allow anyone (literally) to contribute, whether in the form of new entries, edits to existing entries, or discussion of entries. It is designed to be a collaborative project wherein the "final" versions of entries are the representative expression of as many people as are interested in the given topic.

Obviously, the first thing I did was look up "Metallica" to see what was there. A few minutes later I was hurriedly looking up instructions on how to edit the main Metallica entry. While I wasn't interested in completely rewriting the entry, there were some pretty glaring factual errors as well as some very awkward prose, and I at least wanted to make things a little clearer. Still, I had reservations when I found that I needed to delete completely a few sentences rather than just edit them for factual correctness. What makes participating in the Wikipedia interesting is the fact that there are no authors credited in any of the entries, so they appear at once authoritative and anonymous, or somehow unwatched by other people. In other words, you come across the Metallica entry (for instance) and you see it just sitting there, with this link above it that says "Edit this page," and you think to yourself, "Really?" Basically the web isn't supposed to operate that way, right? People just can't change the content of a web page without hacking, can they? The Metallica entry was also tricky because much of the entry had clearly been written by someone/people who were primarily fans, folks who certainly had opinions about Metallica. Opinions are fine, but I couldn't help but notice how obviously informed they were by the statutes of rock authenticity. As I was figuring out how I would contribute to the entry I kept running into the idea that the entry was supposed to be a collaborative project, and thus reflect the viewpoints of many different participants. Simply deleting entire sentences seemed to go against that premise in a pretty harsh manner. Yet, I couldn't escape the fact that some of the information in that sentence was simply wrong (i.e, Metallica's 1987 album was not called The $9.98 CD: Garage Days Re-Visited - it wasn't released on CD until several years later, and its title is Garage Days Re-Revisited), or influenced by myth, rumor, and hearsay. So my contributions reflect a delicate balancing act: in some cases I deleted away while I let others stand because they didn't really say anything that was factually incorrect even though they might have an embarrassing (to me?) sentiment to them.

No names appear on any of the edits in the entry itself, but you can view a list of "editors" and the versions of the entry which existed before each "editor" got involved. In a sense, then, even though I removed some portions of the entry, the earlier versions still exist in the Wikipedia database, a nice touch I think. Somewhat paranoid-edly-iously, I'm waiting for some random email from one of the previous contributors who will write angrily to me, saying "don't fuck with my entry, dude. mine was totally cool and totally right." I suppose if that happens I'll have to respond and correct their misconceptions, but in reality I have no idea how, or even if, people will respond to the changes I made. It's certainly possible that someone will simply replace my corrections with the previous information. And then I'll replace their's, and they'll replace mine, etc. Of course, there are supposed to be little message boards to work this kind of thing out, but we'll see.

Anyway, after editing the Metallica entry I inspected the entries for all of the albums and made a few more corrections and clarifications. Mostly just formatting stuff though.

Anyway anyway, do check out Wikipedia. It's fun and you get to feel smart. :)