Author: Andrew Sullivan

Robert Berry describes Black Midi, which is known “for the incredible density of notes crammed onto [songs’] scores”:

Artists use cheap software like Synthesia, intended as a vaguely Guitar Hero-ish piano tuition aid, as a means of visualising their pieces for YouTube consumption. Notes rain down on the piano keyboard like a tropical storm with some pieces averaging more than 60,000 notes a second, note counts in the millions – even billions – over the course of a few minutes. At moments of the most extreme densities, the system’s ability to represent the information it is being fed breaks down and the sound erupts into a scree of digital distortion. There is a reason why so many ‘blackers’ refer to their tunes as “impossible music”.

When I described the Black Midi stuff I’d heard to [electronic artist] Holly Herndon, she was apt to liken it to the early twentieth century cluster chords of Charles Ives, or to think of it as a kind of absurdist critique – whether deliberate or not – of the extremes of virtuosity demanded by the ‘new complexity’ music of composers like Brian Ferneyhough. … As I plunged through the online rabbit hole of Black Midi wikis and YouTube channels, with their frenzied cover versions of classic video game soundtracks, their hyperbolic boasts of lavish cpu- busting note densities; I heard something at once comfortingly alien and peculiarly childlike.

(Video: “Bad Apple” by TheSuperMarioBros2)

Roberto A. Ferdman and Ritchie King describe how they created the above Beer Index:

Numbeo, a crowd-sourced database of the price of goods around the world, maintains a comprehensive list of the average price of a domestic draft beer in different countries. And the International Labor Organization (ILO) maintains a vast library of minimum monthly wage data. So we combined the two—into a beer indicator, of sorts.

By dividing the average price a local has to pay to get a beer by the hourly minimum wage (assuming a 40-hour work week) a person makes in each country, we were able to approximate how long it takes someone making the minimum wage to earn enough to buy a brew at a local bar. The Economist did something similar back in 2012, but used countries’ median wages, and only included 27 countries. This one is a bit more comprehensive (and a bit more about the people who make the least.)

The Economist notes the surprising rise of “dry bars” in Britain, with three operating in London, Liverpool, and Nottingham and two more set to open soon:

Unlike many cafés, they stay open late. They emulate bars in other ways, with live music, comedy acts and films to pull in punters. When the lights go down and the DJ plays at Sobar, which opened in Nottingham in January, it looks like any city bar, hopes Alex Gillmore, the manager. Redemption misses the hefty profits made on alcohol, but temperance brings its own benefits. Business remains steady throughout the week rather than spiking at the weekend, says Catherine Salway, its founder. The absence of drunken, obstreperous patrons means that bouncers are unnecessary.

Sobar, like the Brink in Liverpool, is linked to a do-gooding drug and alcohol charity. But ordinary drinking dens are becoming a little drier, too, out of business sense rather than temperance principle. Pubs can make almost as much selling food as drink – and more are serving it. Both in pubs and at home, less boozy drinks are becoming popular. Total sales of beer by volume dropped slightly in the year to January, but those of the weaker kinds, with just 1.3-3.3 percent alcohol by volume, jumped 32 percent, according to Kantar Worldpanel, a market-research firm.

Mark O’Connell investigates how a line from Beckett’s Worstward Ho – “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” – has entered a “strange afterlife as a motivational meme” for the Silicon Valley set:

The entrepreneurial class has adopted the phrase with particular enthusiasm, as a battle cry for a startup culture in which failure has come to be fetishized, even valorized. Sir Richard Branson, that affable old sage of private enterprise and bikini-based publicity shoots, has advocated from on high the benefits of Failing Better. He breaks out the quote near the end of an article about the future of his multinational venture capital conglomerate, telling us with characteristic self-assurance that it comes “from the playwright, Samuel Beckett, but it could just as easily come from the mouth of yours truly.” …

Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive feel, is the literary takeaway par excellence; it’s usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to “think different” or “work smarter” or “just do it.” And the fact is that these six telegraphic bursts of exhortation actually work pretty well as a personal motto, once that sanding and smoothing has been completed. They are also—and this is crucial, though obviously not something Beckett would have had in mind—eminently tweetable; the whole thing comes in at just 69 characters, which leaves people plenty of room for whatever commentary or show of approval they might want to append.

A viral image urging people to unplug:

Rachel Baron Singer challenges “the writer’s questionable sense of nostalgia.” Looking back past the 90s to the Jazz Age parties of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s day, she suggests that meaningful human connection was no easier when people met only face-to-face instead of on Facebook:

[A]part from the wild parties, [artists and socialites] Gerald and Sara Murphy are also famous for being the inspiration behind Dick and Nicole Diver, the alluring but emotionally insolvent protagonists of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, a novel that is, if nothing else, a tale of detachment and marital loneliness. The book is rife with comments about how alone Dick and Nicole feel in one another’s company (and with friends and lovers, to boot). In one scene, in which the pair sits in frosty silence, Fitzgerald notes how Dick “often felt lonely with [Nicole],” and in another, he describes Nicole as “leading a lonely life, owning Dick, who did not want to be owned.” Most poignantly, in Chapter 12, Fitzgerald writes: ” . . . they sat with the children on the Moorish roof and watched the fireworks of two casinos, far apart, far down on the shore. It was lonely and sad to be so empty-hearted toward each other.”

How much of this sentiment is based upon impressions of the Murphys versus Fitzgerald’s own fractured relationship with [his wife] Zelda is difficult to say, but the point still stands that in the literary imagination of the Jazz Age, people who engage in the most public, grandiose acts of socialization (what our sign writer might consider to be living), are the ones who are the most isolated from real human interaction. This is certainly a prevalent theme in The Great Gatsby, where lavish, glamorous parties — undoubtedly influenced to some degree by those thrown by the Murphys — are portrayed as the ultimate symbol of social disengagement. Gatsby is as alone at his parties as he is in death, and that goes for anyone and everyone else.