Suppose you wake up one morning and want to change the face of popular music. With that kind of ambition, you won’t be satisfied just being popular or pandering to the buying public. You are going to tear the music world a new one. All your interests will be represented. Technology, mesmerizing stage shows, true love and the promise of a whole other universe, parallel to our own, whose rules we can only peripherally understand.

You want to create a mythos to accompany your compositions. Parliament had the mothership. Zepplin had the hedgerow infested with bustles. Egyptian Lover had his house on the Nile. Bootsy had 14 carat funk, ya’ll. Similarly, the electronic duo La Bionda have whatever this is. Behold: “I wanna be your lover.” You had me at spaceship, guys.

P.S. Yes those are a bunch of kids they are singing to.

Full disclosure: I am an amateur physicognomist and all-around student of how things move/shake/twist/roll and/or bounce in what philosophers have long referred to as “the like, whole universe, man.”

Please don’t think I am bragging when I say, humbly, that I know how things work. Do you wonder what will happen if you drop an egg? Wonder no more, dear reader. This is exactly the sort of thing my training prepares me to address. It will break. Sometimes yellow stuff flies everywhere, sometimes not. What do I have in common with the world’s most complex and expensive computer models predict will happen if you tilt a half-filled glass?[1] We both predict the same outcome–pouring water. There are differences, however. My explanation will be delivered in a sensuous, almost hypnotic baritone while the computers will mostly beep and boop. Before any announcement can be made, the computer’s handlers will read reams of ticker tape excreted from a buzzing metallic void, confer, and report in their favorite journal about the findings. The tentative title will be “On Not Crying: An approximate Navier-Stokes model of Milk Spillage.” Eventually, a public statement can be made. But be warned. It will be the words of the computer you will be hearing, translated into human speech by the “scientists.” The announcement will not be made with the tenderness you have come to expect. Remember our time together, not so long ago? You wondered about eggs falling, and I told you what would happen in a sensuous, almost hypnotic baritone and for one moment, you, the universe, and science were one? Man that was awesome.

Bottom line: You should get your science from me, and not computers that couldn’t care less about you if they came preloaded with software specifically designed to make them care less about you. To show you I am serious, I give you the following physics tutorial. With my background it’s easy for me to dismiss most movie effects as ridiculous. Once in a while, though, somebody puts in the time to make their action sequence realistic. When this happens, movies stop being just movies and start being awesome movies you wish you lived in.

---

[1] Actually they will probably say half-empty glass, because computer models are heartless bastards. My advice to computers and their models? Pick up a harlequin romance novel once in a while and learn about humanity.

Let’s assume you are familiar with the technicolor dungstorm that is the american scenic byway attraction circuit. Like me, you’ve already visited the 90-foot shirtless Santa in Scarville, VA. You probably wondered, as I did, “Who is Jesus’ favorite down home style country comedian?” Well, you learned all that and more while watching hi-def Jerry Clower footage at Jesus’s Favorite Country Comedians, provided by IMAX and the Impact, GA chamber of commerce. You’ve driven your nitrous-boosted Buick Skylark to Tonsure, MA and spent two glorious days touring Milton Bradley’s “Livestock Processing Land.” Like me you fell in love with the concept of Slaughterhouse-based edutainment in general and the HungryHungryHippos Hoof Removal Dance Party in particular. Day after glorious day you search and invariably find examples of American madness and deformity, complete with entrance fees and gift shops. Museum dedicated to the clothing of serial killers? You bet. Ice cream stand / Fully operation pony express office? Check. After a while, though, these kinds of roadside attractions start to look like just one more plastic monkey in a larger barrel of plastic monkeys (Milton Bradley on the brain, I guess). It’s time to step up your game…raise the stakes…use a cliche about increased risk.

What if there was an entire town devoted to wunderkammen-style attractions. An entire community fueled by deformity, brain malfunction and sequins. The universe has seen fit to provide just such a place– Branson, MO.

---

Behold! Fiddle Master Shoji Tobuchi, performing at the Shoji Tobuchi theater

with the help of various Tabuchis in residence!

http://www.vimeo.com/6695197

---

Marvel as this sorceress stretches her leotard to its absolute limit

gesturing mechanically towards magical stage pieces!

---

Baldknobbers, HO!

---

Try in vain to wrap your feeble brainmeat around this

religio-countryandwestern-patriotic masterpiece!

If you are not listening to Plastic Tales from the Marshmallow Dimention, you should go there now and lock your earholes on it. As a rabid fan and universal arbiter of all things strange, awesome and otherwise mind-blowing, I suggest you check it out. It’s a show at WNYU (which is littered with great music and general programming, by the way). Only rarely do I listen to an entire episode and NOT hear something completely new to me.

I remember the exact moment I realized this was no ordinary radio program. I heard an incomprehensible but magnificent psychedelic love ballad/crazy all naked musical tragicomedy/john phillip sousa tribute electro cover band so odd I couldn’t listen to it directly. Actually, until that moment I didn’t know I even had peripheral hearing, but if I listened directly, the music would fade like faint objects in a night sky. I hurried to the playlist, hoping to track what lost bit of 60’s-iana I had recovered. It turned out the track was only a couple of years old, and in japanese (which only partially explains the incomprehensibility of the lyrics).

Every show is like being a human cannonball in some drug-addled circus. But rather than being fired into a net, you climax each of your performances by being launched into unaired american bandstand footage from a parallel, much cooler, universe.

If there is one thing I love it’s words. And science. And math. Oh, and pictures that explain relationships between words, science and math. Come to think of it, I also have a deep, heartfelt, first-love-at-summer-camp style devotion to technology. If I could, I would invite all these various affairs to a dinner party at my newly completed library and let them mingle. Mingling would lead to chatting amiably about the relative merits of modelling versus simulation and “who even know the difference anyway?” followed by warm laughter and a feeling of newfound camaraderie. This growing affection between my loves would lead, as it inevitably does, to the consumption of near lethal doses of cognac and wormwood cigarellos.

What we know about the rest of the party has been pieced together from partially recovered security footage:  Science stumbled into the study and demanded that Words behave themselves in the presence of a lady. Presumably he meant Pictures, the only other guest nearby.  Later, Words cancelled a parcheesi tournament because Technology had eaten all the guacamole.  Then the kissing.  Lord a’Mercy the kissing.

Anyhoo, long story short they all got pregnant, regardless of gender, and had a litter of hybrid science/lit/art/tech striplings.  The first of these cross-breeds was introduced to us over breakfast in the atrium.  His name was Robin Sloan.  He arrived without invitation, but will not be asked to leave until we hear all that he has to say.

He is using some scroll sniffers to track how readers navigate his texts.  Super interesting, right?   He is also using graphing utilities to visualize the data.  Also interesting.  Go check it out: Robin Sloan’s code is watching you read Robin Sloan’s code.

More on Sloan and the new generation of hypertext lit later…chapter one: Does subliminal content have to be evil?