Moby

Last night, I went to a Moby concert. I'm not a huge Moby fan by any means, but EVERYBODY likes his stuff. You can't not. So when my friend badgered me to go see him, I acquiesed, thinking I would at least get to dance.

What. A. Show.

Probably the best I've seen in Montreal...although the Jazz Fest shows from this summer definitely are up there. The best way to describe it is probably half rave, half rock show. Most of it was a live band show: Moby on guitar (he's a great guitarist, btw...who knew?), a mostly female backing band, and this big black lady backup singer with an absolutely phenomenal voice. She handled singing most of the samples ("Why does my heart....feel so bad?"), especially the ones he took from old Alan Lomax folk recordings. The rest were handled by his keyboardist/opening act/probably at least part-time lover, this woman from Brooklyn who, despite being a little white girl with hipster bangs, just about blew the roof off the damn place when she started singing.

The live stuff was suprisingly rock-y. Lots of crunchy guitar riffs and pounding drums, and a few suprises that seemed to hint at Moby's underlying love for funk, blues and classic rock--an oddly straightforward cover of Neil Young's "Helpless" and a raw, bluesy version of "Honey" (with guitar replacing piano) that turned into a big jam with the band launching into badass covers of both "Whole Lotta Love" and "War Pigs" (!).

This was, of course, supplemented with some decidedly more dance-oriented stuff. Although I'm decidedly more of a rocker than a raver, there's something pretty amazing about a sweaty room packed full of bodies, flashing lights, and pulsating bass. Plus, who doesn't love dancing?

Possibly the most surprising (although not so much in retrospect) is how much of a nerd Moby is. His onstage banter consisted of some horribly butchered "merci beaucoup"s after every song (which nonetheless got huge cheers from the mostly Francophone crowd) and decidedly un-rock-star-like asides like a five-minute ramble about the new effects pedals he bought for his guitar, ending with his admission that "sorry, you probably don't want to hear some middle aged guy talk about his guitar equipment." Despite the fact that his music had the audience in the palm of his hand for a couple hours, he seemed like the kind of guy who needed to speak through that medium--as a person, he would probably be a lot more happy sitting at home with his sampler and turntables. His stage banter wasn't his voice. That honor belonged to his beats.

A shout out...

...to my friend Angela, who has started drawing a lovely semi-autobiographical web comic in her spare time:

More Than This Provincial Life

Most of the humor is probably funnier if you actually know the people involved--if anything, the author has toned DOWN the hilarity of the "main characters"--but it's still worth checking out. It's great stuff.

Overarching themes

It could be that I'm crazy (always a possibility), but I've found that every semester of my university career has had some sort of "theme" to it. Last semester, for example, I found that a lot of the concepts I was taking in across my classes revolved around the theme of "self." That might sound over broad, but there was a definite thread. Existentialism was the most obvious source of this, but I found that little things in my other classes pointed the way as well.

This semester, it's "how we become what we are." I'm taking Cognitive Development (should be obvious); Biomedical Ethics, in which we are currently discussing personal identity and at what point a fetus becomes a person; Genes and Behaviour, in which we are discussing how our genes and our environment shape us as people; and 18th/19th Century German Philosophy, in which we're currently discussing how we come to gain the knowledge we have.

It might seem like a stretch, and I'm definitely not claiming to uncover some sort of grand conspiracy--maybe it says more about me than about the classes--but I still think its interesting.

A brief rant about cinnamon gum and related atrocities

Okay, seriously, this stuff sucks. It's like someone decided that the best idea in the world was to have a gum that BURNS YOUR MOUTH WHEN YOU CHEW IT. You know that wonderful cooling feeling mint gives you afterwards? Yeah, cinnamon doesn't do that. It makes me feel like I have a case of strep throat--something I'm sure every product should aim for. Also, I sure as hell would rather have any giver of kisses to me taste "minty fresh" over "cinnamon-y fresh."

See, that second one isn't even an ad-slogan-turned-expression. It's stupid. About the only piece of candy that I hate more than cinnamon gum are these:
...that is, all except the one second from the left. I have many memories as a child of picking a candy cane which, to my colorblind young self, appeared to be a stick of minty deliciousness, only to find it tasting a bit like what I picture day-glo paint tasting like. God made candy canes mint. That's all they should be.

Back to the grind...

HUMAN reason has this peculiar fate that in one species
of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as pre-
scribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to
ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also
not able to answer. 

The perplexity into which it thus falls is not due to any
fault of its own. It begins with principles which it has no
option save to employ in the course of experience, and which
this experience at the same time abundantly justifies it in
using. Rising with their aid (since it is determined to this
also by its own nature) to ever higher, ever more remote,
conditions, it soon becomes aware that in this way -- the
questions never ceasing -- its work must always remain
incomplete; and it therefore finds itself compelled to resort
to principles which overstep all possible empirical employ-
ment, and which yet seem so unobjectionable that even
ordinary consciousness readily accepts them. But by this
procedure human reason precipitates itself into darkness
and contradictions; and while it may indeed conjecture
that these must be in some way due to concealed errors,
it is not in a position to be able to detect them. For since
the principles of which it is making use transcend the limits
of experience, they are no longer subject to any empirical
test.

-Immanuel Kant

Sometimes I wonder why I got into philosophy.