Salsa Dancing. Bridging Generations.

Last Wednesday, Jeremy and I went out with Natalie, a future classmate and dormmate of mine at LSE and her friend, Jen. After drinks at a charity toy-drive for cancer kids, we went Salsa dancing. That is, Natalie went dancing and the rest of us tried to learn and follow along as best we could. It wasn't like the days back at Legends in Champaign when everyone was just beginning to learn how to swing dance. The tension between the lead and the follower, the effortless way the men tied the women and themselves into and out of knots of arms, shoulders, and torsoes, the fast music and the heat, and the play of emotions on the faces of the women, all made it a great pleasure to watch and be a part of, and I've resolved to learn how to do that.

The next day, I went to visit my great-aunt. She and my grandma were one of five sisters in a Ukranian family, and they both married Italians against the wishes of their parents. They were all very into the Chicago dance scene back in the thirties and forties, and that'sactually how my grandpa and grandma met. My great uncle was
complaining today that young people never dance anymore, and he was delighted when I told him that I had just been dancing the night before. He had never heard of Salsa, and when I showed him the step, he got so excited that he called my great aunt into the room to have me show her.

So in addition to being fun, going dancing let me bridge generations just a little bit.

A New Take On My (non-) Band. We Dominate the Bandwidths of Silence.

It's always been a dream of mine to be in a band that plays acutal music. I say the latter because I've actually been in many bands, in the sense that I've often been in groups of people with a name and a vague intention to play music, but never one that really did shows or anything.

Here's the list to date: in grade school I was in the "Damn Pigeons" (our hit single was to be a song that we actually wrote called "Don't Shit On My Sidewalk"), then in high school it was the "Straw Dogs" (I wrote some music with a midi composer for it but we never really went any further than that) and "Qadafi and the Hit Squad" (a big brass band with two songs, performed once each at an open mike: "Big Noise From Winetka" for the full twelve-or-so-piece group, and me on the euphonium with a lone hi-hat covering "Rubber Ducky"). College was a dry spell, though I guess I played with the UIUC symphonic bands and did ska covers with my neighbors in their attic. (These neighbors were the kind of guys who would get so drunk they would throw all their appliances into the street at 3am, and I had great fun playing with them, but we never really got our act together in a way that we could do a show or even really appear in public together.)

I've also sat in on harmonica for the Uncle John's House Band, an Armenian funk band in an underground club in Moscow, and I played harmonica and did some supporting vocals (in the orgasm sequence) on Green Team's (a Kokshetau Kazakhstan punk band) eponymous release of last year. (After playing one concert with them, the only one I ever did, I was described in a Kazakhstan newspaper as being a "new member of the band", so I think maybe that kind of counts.) Starting in Boise I started a solo career under the monicer "Pow-Wow Cat", and actually got one song I wrote and perfomed, "Married Her In Kentucky" played on Kentucky public radio. Other songs from this period that have earned a following of two fans (and reactions ranging from mild surprise to tired impatience from many others) include "The Monkey Song", "The Can Song", and a true-life sentimental ballad about my friend Tasha called "Flushing Through The Night". If I ever release an album with songs from this era, it'll be called "Slow Dancing With Turtles".

Here in Chicago I "formed" the latest addition, "The Empty Neologisms". Our first album would be called "Dirty Hamster, Lovely Dress". It is basically formed of me, Jake (my roommate), Molly (his girlfriend), and Matt Zanon, whom I greatly respect both for his refined musical taste and for writing an influential (on me) song called "Rachel Don't Surf". So far we've had one "practice" which was about three hours of sitting around and then Matt and I writing a pretty interesting song about Giffen goods and the income and substitution effects in microeconomics. That was a month ago, and with me leaving Chicago in two weeks, I don't have high hopes for us actually gigging anywhere before I go.

However, Jake and Matt pointed out (after many hot and dehydrated days under the Yosemite sun, I might add), that perhaps we are doing more with our non-music than we could with music. As long as the Empty Neologisms don't play anything, they're constantly playing us everywhere. You are listening to our (non-)song right now. Even if you're listening to something else, there we are in the background, not playing. In this sense, perhaps we are the most ubiquitous band in the history of pop music. Sure, you might say, I'm not listening to the songs the Beatles didn't write right now. A fair objection, but the crucial difference is that the Beatles didn't not write that song to not perform it, they didn't write it because of Yoko Ono. As the only band without a "Yoko" - and every band that has not written some song has some sort of "Yoko" - we are the only band not writing music explicitly to have it not be performed, and by making this decision, it becomes us who dominates the bandwidths of silence. It's kind of like John Cage brought to pop music, but without the time limit.

And don't go thinking you can cut in on our airtime just by making a band and not playing anything. We thought of it first.

A Great Idea For a Movie

Jim and I think it's pretty funny, anyway. Here it is. (I declare this copyrighted or something, so don't go making this without involving us.)

A man is in the bathroom, on the toilet. There's silence, and
straining, and a splash, and then a sudden wailing voice saying, "You
BIRTHED me! You BIRTHED me! I am your SON! I LOVE you!" The man
jumps up, and in the toilet, noisily splashing around, is a little
octopus. The octopus is the one speaking. (Actually, it'll be me.
I've been cast as the octopus voice.)

Then the film takes a "Run Lola Run" twist. The way the man responds
to having birthed the octopus determines his fate. In the first
version, he is so surprised that he flushes the octopus. He is then
beset by a sense of guilt, causing him to make frequent trips to the
aquarium and gaze mournfully at full-sized octopuses. Finally, he
breaks down, screaming at the aquarium tank, "Why did you do this to
me? Why?" Bewildered families look on. (I think the bewilderment
could be real if we film this in the actual Chicago oceanarium.)

Then: flash back. He leave the octopus in, but it won't shut up. He
can't bring himself to flush it, but he doesn't want to take it out
because it's, well, it's kind of weird. Unfortunately, he has company
coming over for dinner. The guests come, and sit down at the table.
They don't seem to notice that anything is unusual, although the hero
can hear the octopus clearly. Finally, one of them asks to get up and
go to the bathroom. The hero is beside himself, but trying to act
polite, and fails to think of a reason that the guest couldn't go to
the bathroom, so they just get up and go. The hero is in a panic as
the guest goes through the normal bathroom sounds, including flushing
the toilet, with no interruption of the mournful cries or indication
that anything is unusual. They sit back down at the table and resume
the conversation. It is clear that only the hero can see and hear the
octopus. He loses it, and shakingly, stands up, goes to the closet,
and gets a plunger. The guests stare on, bewlidered, as he goes into
the bathroom and starts madly plunging at the toilet, screaming, "why
are you doing this to me? WHY?" (The answer, of course, is "I am
your SON! I LOVE you!")

Flash back again. When the octopus begins to wail, the man pauses, straining at the reins of his fate, and then starts to
dance a weird, modern dance. The octopus levitates out of the toilet
and begins to dance, too. Someone walks in, and says, "that's the
best octopus I've ever seen...ever seen...ever seen..ever seen..." and
we loop that last line and it becomes part of the beat for a
dance-style drum and bass song. Cut to the Chicago lakefront. The octopus
and a bunch of guys wearing helmets and knee pads are doing "extreme
walking", which is like Parquer but much lamer, where we kind of jump
up on benches, strike a pose, jump down again and then give each other
big, ostentatious high fives. Bewildered passersby look on.

Women and Chess, and Women and Men

At the Pitchfork music festival here in Chicago, KC (a female friend of minef) and I set up a chess board and played against the festival. That is, we invited passers-by to make the moves for white, and we would move for black. No passer-by was allowed to move more than once. Naturally, we kicked Pitchfork's butt. It was kind of what I suppose it would be like to play against the guy from Memento.

The interesting thing was the different responses of women and men when we tried to get people to make moves. I was standing up and inviting everyone who walked by to take a turn for black, and I suppose I preferentially solicited women, natch. There were a few people of both sexes who did know how to play chess, moved gladly, and lamented the previous moves of all their fellow players. But what was interesting was that among the rest, almost without exception, women would say, "Oh, I don't know how to play chess, I can't do it," whereas men would say, "I don't know how to play chess, but what the hell." The trend was unmistakeable and consistent, and both KC and I observed it.

I've heard this sort of behavior described as one of the reasons women, starting around puberty, tend to be less "successful" in math and science classes on average than men, but I've never seen it more clearly demonstrated. It kind of makes me want to do a real experiement. And in a question that is analogous to asking what a teacher should do in the classroom to encourage women with mathematical talent, I wonder if I could have changed my banter to attract women to play more readily.

Pictures of Concept Picnics

Emily has graciously taken and posted pictures of July's concept picnics:

Picnic 1
Picnic 2
Picnic 3

Emily is a very talented photographer, and has a business of her own. She'll photograph weddings, portraits, and probably other things, too. For more information, check out her website.

Backpacking in Yosemite

Some friends and I took a backpacking trip to the Northeast corner of Yosemite. Here are some selected pictures. More detailed description to come.

An Apologia for Concept Picnics

Just before I left Boise, Lindsey and I had the idea for "concept picnics", that is, picnics in unusual locations or having other strange features. For example, everyone could wear suits and having a picnic in a cemetary, or we could bring only pies and eat in a traffic median, which were the first two concept picnics we did in Boise. I'm trying to re-start this tradition in Chicago, and last Sunday we all had a picnic in a children's playground. (We wanted to have it on this abandoned railroad trestle, but it was decided when we got there that half the party was unwilling to do the necessary climbing.)

I just love bulshitting about the concept behind concept picnics. For example: Milan Kundera says that there's an aesthetics of kitsch, which I understand like this: say you see a child running with a baloon, and think to yourself not, "How lovely, a child running with a baloon", but rather, "How lovely, to be sitting here watching a child running with a baloon". You are not perceiving beauty, but rather participating in a widely held notion of what is beautiful, and congratulating yourself on that.

Picnics /are/ nice, and carry with them certain picnic-symbols: a basket, a frisbee, a nice lawn, pleasant surroundings, casual dress, maybe fellow-picnicers, and lovely weather. The church picnic is one of our culture's great icons of wholesomeness. I enjoy picnics like this, but they're so thoroughly iconified that one can't be sure if one is actually enjoing them or enjoing enjoying them. One way to find out is to break the stereotypes, one or two variables at a time - have your picnic in a stairwell, but hold everything else constant, or have it in a park, and cross-dress. In this way, we are not deviating from picnics, but plunging through the kitsch into the PICNIC ITSELF, that is the genuine experience of the picnic.

I could go on. But another reason I like our concept picnics is that it exposes you to the fact that there are other slightly kooky people out there. For example, as we were climbing the fence onto the railroad trestle (the willing did this just to see what was up there before the playground-picnic began), an unmarked white van drove up, stopped, and a man got out and walked towards us. When he got close enough, he stopped, put his hands on his hips, and we looked at each other, I on the ground, and my friend halfway up the fence. I started to run through possible excuses in my mind, and didn't find anything very plausible. Finally, the man spoke. "Isn't there supposed to be a way to get up there without climbing the fence?" he said. "Um, really?" my friend asked. "I think it's east of here. Do you know where it is?" "Uh, no, but that would be nice," my friend answered said. "Hmm. Well, I guess I'll keep looking," he said, and drove off.

The Diminishing Marginal Value of the Dollar Underestimates Elasticity

I don't think I'm out of line posting observations about my economics studies, especially considering that my expected audience consists of no one. So here goes.

I came across a table in my micro textbook about how the price elasticity of luxury cars is lower than for economy cars. Not really knowing anything about the car market, I'd like to suggest that in addition to the reason the book gives for this (which is that there are less interchangable brands of luxury cars), there is the fact that rich people care about their money less, which will cause the standard method of calculating elasticity to underestimate the elasticity of high-priced goods.

Mathematically, if the price elasticity is (p/q)(dq/dp) (where p is price and q is quantity demanded), rich people which will tend to overstate dP terms for high-priced items. This is because if you have a lot money, your buying decisions are based on a non-linear scale of the value of the dollar. Say there’s a function p*(p), which represents the real perceived value of money. Let p*’(p) denote the first derivative of p*. Clearly p*’(0)=1, and since the marginal value of money decreases as you have more of it, p*’(p)<1 (and p*’’(p)<0). The elasticity of a good will be (p/q) times (dq/dp)=(dq/dp*)(dp*/dp)<(dq/dp*). The buyer perceives dq/dp*, since p* represents what he actually values, but the economist has to measure dq/dp. If luxury cars and budget cars have the same elasticity perceived by the buyer, this argument shows that the measured elasticity will be too low.

It would be interesting to see a study measuring something like a p* function.

Keeping It Strange In the USA

Shortly after I got back, I started running again, and my route carried me through the new McMansion subdivisions by my house. The development I was running through was really very nice, with lots of trees, wandering roads, and lovely custom built homes. The problem was that there didn't seem to be anyone -in- them. That is, they were well-kept, with cars in the driveway, maybe a playset in the backyard, and flags on the porch, but I never saw any actual people. Everyone stays holed up in their own home. The only people I really saw outside were construction workers building new houses and law-mowing services, they didn't even come outside to mow their own lawns.

After a few days, when the alienation was starting to get to me a little, my dad proposed that we go pick mulberries to serve with ice cream to guests who were coming to visit us. Thinking of some trees I knew about in the woods when I was younger, and having fond memories of filling pans with hand-picked berries, I agreed. When the time came to go, we stepped out into the garage, and my dad started to get into the car. "We're going to drive, I asked?" my image of a nice walk in the woods fading. "I know a good tree in the new housing development", my dad said, and I grudgingly got in the passenger seat.

We drove to a particular McMansion and parked by the curb. Sure enough, there was a mulberry tree full of ripe fruit a few feet from the side of the road. "You can find them by the stains on the road," my dad explained. I got out and started to pick, but my dad stopped me. "I have a better method", he said, and I watched as he pulled an old stained bedsheet (which he had used previously as a tarp for painting) and a long retractable golf-ball retreiver. "The first ten feet of their lawn is actually public property", my dad explained, "So I feel we are withing our bounds to do this." He laid the bedsheet out under the tree, expanded the golf-ball retreiver, and with it started to shake the upper branches of the tree.

Sure enough, all the mulberries that were ripe enough to pick fell out of the tree onto the bedsheet, and when we had enough, we lifted up the corners of the bedsheet, funneled the berries into the pan, and moved the sheet under a new branch for shaking. Although we got some extra sticks and leaves, we didn't get all messy like you usually do when picking by hand. This was not the greatest benefit of this method, though, as far as I was concerned. The best part came when a couple of women came by, power-walking, in expensive-looking powerwalking clothes. My dad was in mid-shake with his golf-ball retreiver, our stained bedsheet half-full of dark berries, twigs, and leaves, spread out over the immaculate lawn of some stranger's house. "We need pickers!" my dad loudly announced to them by way of greeting. "Ha, ha!" they said. "Picking mulberries?" "We're SHAKIN' em!" he said. "Ha ha!" they said, and powerwalked away, maybe a little faster than before.

With this, I felt a lot better about the new housing developments. Whether or not most people stay inside, their are still mulberry-shakers around, and as it should, the neighborhood belongs to them, not the powerwalkers.