The Kindness of Strangers

I’d like to popularize my version of Connect Four that’s for people with short attention spans. The rules are just like normal Connect Four, except:
a) There are no turns. You can each play as fast as you can.
b) However, you can only use one hand to play and you can only hold one chip at a time.

That’s it. I think it’s awesome. You’re basically slotting chips in the columns as fast as you can, using your one hand, trying to block the other guy’s series and creating your own. It’s not just about speed, since the one-hand rule ensures that you have plenty of time to block your opponent’s four-in-a-row if you can see it coming. Fun for hours!

Oh, here are some crappy things about BART, other than the obvious (infrequent, doesn’t go much anywhere in the city):
1. When you’re in the train, it’s often very hard to figure out what stop you’re at. The signs are small and unlit, and the PA is virtually impossible to hear.
2. No maps on the platform. What’s with that?
3. Bathrooms are inaccessible or nonexistant.

Perhaps more to come. I generally love public transportation, but the places in which it’s done well (in order: NYC, DC, Chicago/Boston) put the BART in stark relief.

I’ve been writing some friends-only posts recently, but here is one link that shouldn’t have been protected: you NEED to check out this ridiculously awesome clip of the 2003 World Air Guitar Champion. Words cannot describe his awesomeness. I’ve watched that clip like five times today and have yet to grow tired of it.

Anyway, so my question today is about creating art and stems from writing music. If you’re writing a song, unless the entire thing just appeared in your head (which for me is a rare occurrence), you’re really faced with a sequence of choices: which way the melody will turn, what chord will come next, how to structure this section of the song, etc. (I don’t know how real composers write music, but this is what I do.)

The problem is that there are so many choices that every time you make a decision, you are cutting off a gigantic chunk of potentially great-sounding music from your song. And unless you plan on writing many songs, each with the same beginning and differing endings, once you’ve made a choice, you can’t go back: this song will represent, in some sense, your best attempt at plowing through this set of choices given some initial conditions.

That is to say, the song you’re writing is the only song you’ll write that sounds like it. So you better make sure that your decisions are really good, or else you might narrowly miss a great song and end up with something only mediocre.

The problem is that I am not so great at making decisions, and the more complicated and involved a song is, the more decisions I have to make, and the more hesitant I become… which means that my favorite songs are ones that I’ll probably never finish (and you’ll never hear).

Instead, if I start out writing a song with the understanding that it’s going to be blah, and I don’t care how it turns out, I’m able to finish it pretty quickly. Sadly, these are the songs that I end up recording. It’s a bit frustrating.

So my question is this. I don’t have much experience with other forms of art. Is the creation of art (painting, etc.) or prose or poetry subject to similar choices (and thus similar frustration)? Or does an artist, say, really know the whole picture before he touches his brush to the canvas? I imagine that writing is similar to composing, since it is similarly linear…

Fun in Italy
Told to me by my mom, about a friend of a friend.

So this guy’s travelling in Italy by himself. He comes across a gorgeous beach. He’s dying to go swimming. However, he’s heard that Italy is full of thieves waiting to steal your stuff. He checks out his wallet: 35 euros and his credit card. Passport, et al. are safely in his hotel room.

He decides that this beach is so beautiful that even if he loses 35 euros, it might still be worth it. But just in case, he takes his credit card out of his wallet and puts it in the pocket of his swim trunks. He leaves the wallet and his clothes on the beach and proceeds to have a fantastic and refreshing swim in the ocean. Finally he’s had his fill and heads for shore. At that moment he spies his credit card 20 feet away just sinking under the waves. Doh! He shakes his fist at the gods.

Oh well. He gets back to shore and goes to retrieve his clothes and his wallet…. only to find that they are not there. STOLEN. He curses at the gods in several languages. So, credit card lost and wallet and clothes purloined, he trudges back to his hotel in his wet trunks. Luckily in Europe you don’t often take your hotel keys with you, so he gets his key from the front desk and goes up to his room.

He enters his room and finds that it has been TOTALLY RANSACKED. Someone has coincidentally decided to burglar his room and divorce him of everything valuable therein. His remaining money. His laptop. His passport. He realizes that he has run out of all ammo against the gods and admits defeat.

So, armed with no money, no credit card, no proof of identity, he goes to the US Embassy, where he is denied entrance since he cannot show he is a U.S. citizen. He ends up having a friend back home fax in a copy of his birth certificate.

Moral of the story: Don’t ever be as unlucky as this guy.

Fun in Indonesia
(But more harmless fun.)
As occured to my brother’s old roommate when he was travelling through Indonesia with three friends.

One night they retire to a hotel at which they have already made reservations.

The clerk takes the four of them up to a room… with two tiny beds. “We thought we had reserved a room for four people,” they protest. “This is your room,” the clerk says, and that’s that, although they are sure there is some kind of miscommunication and resulting error.

But what can they do? So they squeeze onto the beds and fitfully try to fall asleep. After an hour they hear a knock on the door. “Ah, relief!” they think. “The clerk has come to remedy the error.”

Sure enough, it’s the clerk. “Sorry, we have made a mistake,” he says. “Relief indeed,” the four think. The clerk continues, “Our fault. This is a room for EIGHT people. I will show you your proper room.” At this point they notice the small crowd of people waiting to enter the room, with little idea of what lay ahead.

Flabbergasted, the four companions follow the clerk to their new room — “Four people,” says the clerk smugly as he walks away — to find that it has only ONE bed!

They end up sleeping sideways on the bed, with one on the floor.

Moral of the story: When in Indonesia, do as the Indonesians do, but make hotel reservations for 4x as many people as are actually in your party.

My Sigur Ros kick continues. I’m seeing them live again in just over a week! Actually that’s a pretty crazy concert week for me: Sigur Ros, then Idlewild, then Franz Ferdinand. Earplugs, friends, earplugs. October appears to be semi-indie-but-well-known band month. Last month was singer-songwriter month for me: Aimee Mann, Ben Folds/Rufus Wainwright/Ben Lee, Vienna Teng and the Animators.

Well, enough about concerts. The big news recently is that we threw a huge surprise birthday party for my mom! The ruse was quite elaborate. Maya did much of the planning behind the scenes, including reserving a wing of a nice restaurant in New Haven, she and Meera mailed out invitations, and Umesh and I sneakily arranged to fly in for the weekend. To make sure my mom would come at the right time, my dad had the Dean of Yale College (with whom he’s buddies) formally invite him and my mom to a dinner at the restaurant at the right time. The dinner was ostensibly because a very rich donor faimly was in town and was considering donating to the sciences, so all the department chairs were invited. My parents go to a good number of dinners like this, so when my mom got the email a few weeks ago, she had no way of knowing that this one would be different. Also, her real birthday is in two weeks, so there’s no way she could have suspected anything.

So Umesh and I took the red-eye to New Haven, arriving this past Saturday morning (and going on about an hour of sleep each). Meera and Maya picked us up at the airport, and we hung out in Maya’s dorm room all day. My mom actually called Umesh during the day, and he answered in Maya’s room, as we all sat there, totally silent. He was perfectly nonchalant, mentioning that we had to go to soccer practice soon, etc. My mom had no clue (how could she?). It was great.

So finally we headed over the restaurant and set everything up. The other guests arrived, and we all waited for my mom and dad to arrive together. My dad almost blew it on the way over, but recovered nicely and we had about a two-minute warning before they came.

To say the least, she was speechless when she arrived. (If you know my mom, that’s quite impressive ;). The place was filled with friends, and of course she when she saw Umesh and me there she just couldn’t believe it. It course it was awesome for me to see her and the rest of my family again… although my tiredness (check out how spaced out I am in the second picture) kept creeping up, it was still a wonderful time.