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Considering The Cost
Message games. There's a loaded term. It's a given that games can be more than "fun." They can also be interesting, educational, enlightening, distressing; any number of things. But to hear some people talk, a game can do only one thing well. Either it will be good in the traditional sense — as a game, a plaything, no more thought running through its head than how to function as a toy — or it can carry a message. At which point it will be dour and lifeless, something to be experienced once and then consigned to a shelf to gather dust.
The Cost, designed by Armando Canales and co-authored by Lyndon Martin and Brian Willcutt, is a fistful of sand flung into the face of that assumption.
Welcome to Salmo, one of four countries in The Cost.
Here's the bombshell: The Cost is about the asbestos industry. Unsurprisingly, its mere existence has sparked some minor outrage. Which, given that asbestos-related illnesses claim 39,000 lives every year in the United States alone, is a good reason for wariness. Some games tackle difficult topics by carefully framing their perspective. Players of Pax Pamir, for example, are Afghan chieftains struggling to weather a foreign incursion into their homeland. Freedom: The Underground Railroad is about abolitionists risking their lives to forcibly emancipate slaves. These games' harsher moments are easy pills to swallow because their actors are underdogs, victims, or rebels against an abusive system.
The Cost doesn't accept such a straightforward reading. Here you're the serpent itself. As the head of an asbestos company, your only goal is the raw extraction of profits. Considerations such as safety regulations or protective equipment for your employees are only useful when they help you sidestep greater pitfalls. Sometimes those pitfalls are even desirable. By extension, sometimes a few workers are exactly the sacrifice the volcano of commerce demands.
Hence the burning question: can a game cast you as a prospective real-world villain and stay on safe footing? Even moral footing?
Right away, Canales is willing to stare that question in the face, keeping the human toll of the asbestos industry centered at all times. Depending on how many players are seated, the game takes place in two to four countries, all of them ready to purchase asbestos products. These maps are abstracted, but each has a distinctive geography: the open railways of Rutland and Salmo, the partitioned halves of the U.G.L., the isolated heartland of Pecora. Over the course of a surprisingly brisk four rounds, companies compete to invest in these countries by opening and operating mines and mills, controlling shipping via rail and boat, and keeping a jealous eye on their competitors.
My company is healthy. My employees, less so.
We'll look at the game's broader concepts momentarily. For now, let's look at its central conundrum.
First, asbestos. There are two ways to produce the stuff. Mines dredge raw fibers from the earth and then sell them to mills, where they're refined into a form better suited to commercial application. Either raw or refined asbestos can be sold off-map in a pinch, but it's the refined stuff that the game's countries are hungry for. Each step of this process requires its own investments and offers its own payouts. Shipping raw asbestos to a mill pays out a dollar to every player-owned railway or port it crosses over, plus a tidy payday when the shipment is sold to the mill. Of course, you'll first need to invest in each link of that supply chain, laying rails and opening ports, digging mines and erecting mills, and often competing to ensure that it's your rails, mills, and everything else your competitors are forced to utilize.
Whenever asbestos is produced or refined, it's necessary to pay for the work. Each country has their own currency, complete with subsidies and an exchange rate that fluctuates as companies invest there. This isn't nearly as complicated as it sounds. If anything, Canales knows how to compress complicated ideas until they're incredibly easy to understand, although all those moving parts are best witnessed firsthand. The gist is that your workers expect to be paid in their country's currency. This prompts an element of planning ahead: you hope to build a mill in Pecora next round, but such a project will cost four pecos. It's therefore necessary to plan your finances a full round in advance, ideally by nabbing some pecos while the exchange rate is still favorable.
("Pecos" is my group's term, by the way. Since the game doesn't name the local currencies, we began to refer to them as pecos, uglies, salmonellas, and rutles.)
As mines and mills begin to appear, things get interesting. Asbestos production is always equal to how many workers you have stationed at a particular facility. So you want lots of workers, right? Well, sometimes. This is where The Cost asks its most important question, the one encapsulated in its title: how do you intend to pay to operate your factories? The "safe" option is to spend two units of local currency for every worker. Since you probably haven't played the game, you'll have to believe me when I say that's a considerable pile of money. Even worse, because you're paying for disposable protective equipment, that dollop of cash needs to be spent every single time you use that mine or mill.
What's a billion-dollar corporation to do? You could shell out the cash, but who wants to do that? Alternatively, you could hire fewer workers, but that would also cut into your overall profits. Hey, here's an idea: how about you pay nothing but life itself? One of your workers dies, but you still reap the rewards of his labor by amassing a shiny heap of asbestos ready for the market. There's hardly any downside.
Along with its heavy themes, The Cost is eminently playable.
Sounds grim, doesn't it? Appropriately so. Deceased workers linger on your company board for the duration of the game, little reminders that you valued mammon over man.
Still, somehow, against all odds, this doesn't diminish the pleasure of engaging with The Cost as a functioning game. At one level, it scratches the itch of optimization, although any hopes of crafting a perfect engine are soon tangled with those of your competitors. This is because every one of The Cost's systems is built around the idea of shared and competing incentives. The board for picking investments is a mishmash of possibilities that are soon blocked off by rival selections, spurring a miniature gold rush to claim useful clusters. Exchange rates plummet as additional companies express interest in a country and begin paying premiums for local currency. Infrastructure becomes entangled to gordian proportions, with opposing railways and ports quibbling over shipping privileges. Before long, even simple A-to-B shipments have transformed into winding routes that can profit everybody but yourself. It isn't possible to haggle — if it were, the game's duration might easily double — but there are methods for striking against ascendant corporations, whether depriving them of your own mined asbestos or challenging their natural monopolies.
This is truly thrilling stuff, whether you're claiming routes, strangling a country's logistics, lobbying until everybody is forced to use your ports, or carefully undermining a competitor's investments by delivering a shipment of raw asbestos they can't possibly mill safely. A well-executed turn is as tense and conniving as any battlefield maneuver. Yet none of that subtracts from the game's incisiveness, because it all takes place within the larger picture of cumulative worker mortalities. Although companies don't suffer direct repercussions from the casualties they permit, countries eventually wise up. At first the effect is negligible. That country's market for asbestos products decreases. You can still mine and mill, provided you ship your products elsewhere. But tread carefully, because even the slightest extra nudge will see that country banning asbestos altogether.
Depending on how entrenched you've become in that country, such an event can be apocalyptic. Mines and mills are shuttered, rails gone to rust, ports closed, and the entire country board is flipped over. It's possible to intentionally cause deaths to rob a rival of their asbestos stronghold, although such an act of espionage requires your own facilities and therefore your own measure of investment. As before, everything revolves around that entangled decision space. To the uninitiated or short-sighted, it's rarely worthwhile to pay to keep your workers alive. But when you risk everything? Multiple rounds of infrastructure, carefully manicured routes that are as profitable as your asbestos sales, upgrades upon upgrades? That'll give even the most cankered CEO pause.
As deaths accrue, countries first regulate and then ban asbestos.
In other words, The Cost doesn't present its companies as evil, at least not in such simplistic terms, but as profoundly amoral. Human life doesn't have value because of any natural- or god-given right, but because people sometimes get fed up and force the issue. It's a commentary that manages to stretch beyond the confines of the game's immediate framework in multiple ways.
Consider the absence of civilian life in the countries you enter. Surely they exist somewhere in between the factories and ports, but they're tucked into the map's folds precisely because they're beyond your remit. Or, perhaps more accurately, beneath it. The game's populations are only as important as the working hands they provide, fingers and limbs that can toil at the levers and pulleys of your factories.
Consider how workers don't cost anything to hire, but instead flock to fill any available slot. This calls to mind the arguments that markets are self-regulating and workers are shrewd negotiators on their own behalf, dream logic that somehow overlooks desperation, hunger, and other obligations.
Consider how the dead linger on your company board. It would have been easy to invent some endgame rule. Perhaps, upon tallying profits, the most negligent company should find themselves buried in lawsuits and forfeit their position. An easy solution to perceived callousness, but also a cheap and dishonest solution, betraying both reality and the game's willingness to confront the transgressions of its protagonists. If you can overlook that worker pawn you slid into his coffin, why shouldn't an executive be able to overlook death's numerical abstractions?
Consider the accumulation of costs, and how safely running a mine or mill not only requires that you pay for your living workers, but also those who have died. Is investing in safety ever worthwhile? Or is some degree of expiration acceptable, even expected? At what point do you throw your hands in the air and plunge this sunk cost to the bottom of the ocean?
Consider the inefficiency of your routes, passing through as many friendly railways as possible before arriving at its destination. Isn't this the encapsulation of commerce gone the way of cronyism, touching hands for the sake of greasing palms, feeding itself for no other reason than to gorge?
The game's moral message isn't exactly unclear.
Make no mistake, this isn't some casual gotcha, meant to pull back the curtain at the last moment and expose how you were the baddie all along. Rather, it's an extended illustration of the almost cosmic amorality of profit-driven conglomerates. You were the baddie all along, but then again, you knew that all along, too. Neither does The Cost moralize. Instead, it's deeply moral precisely because it offers its conundrum without belaboring its finer points until you're sick of hearing its nasally voice. Here is the issue, here is your goal, and here are the reasons behind the choices you'll make in the name of success. Games about war at least offer the placating guise of survival or honor or vanquishing fascism. The Cost doesn't even offer such cold comfort.
That is, apart from the upswing of its gameplay. As I wrote earlier, The Cost offers its perspective without swapping in a message at the expense of its play. It's rare in that regard, a lesson that's worth sitting through not only for its rhetorical flourishes, but for the simple pleasure of outfoxing your competitors. This is what marks it as one of the year's most important titles: as a game, as a cautionary tale, and as an example of how to do the latter without sacrificing the former. It's moral without moralizing, enjoyable yet relevant, and intelligent both in part and in sum.
Posted on September 23, 2020, in Board Game and tagged Board Games, Spielworxx, The Cost. Bookmark the permalink.	31 Comments.
nbsp1618 | September 24, 2020 at 8:09 am
Long time reader first time replier.
First, that's for this fantastic review which may be the one that tips me over to paying the cost for this box of cardboard.
With that said however, it has left me a bit… Your last piece on criticism which used The Cost as an example in discussing morality, as a preamble for this review feels off. And the primary reason for that is Cards Against Humanity as the counter point.
It just felt way too easy. Then going into this glowing review of The Cost, almost unfair. I don't think you are planning a critical review of CAH anytime soon, yet there are so many games within your wheelhouse that while maybe not at the moral extreme of CAH in their nuance and perhaps blurring of the moral line would have made for more in depth discussion. Which isn't to say you shouldn't have used CAH as an example. With other examples it could be a good litmus. But as the only other example it sets up a dichotomy which necessitates equal treatment for balance.
Who knows maybe you do have that CAH review queued up, or perhaps it will be addressed further in the next installment, but I felt compelled to share these feelings after reading this review.
Now to go count the pennies it will cost to obtain The Cost.
Dan Thurot | September 24, 2020 at 12:06 pm
Here's the thing: the moral comparison between The Cost and Cards Against Humanity *was* easy! I wrote that piece specifically because of some early comments about The Cost, and I needed an unambiguous counterpoint. My goal was to be clearly delineative between portrayal and endorsement. There's room for gray areas — for example, my essay on how Pax Pamir makes three arguments across two editions — but I didn't want to muddy the waters while trying to explain the difference between spring water and brine. I intend to take a look at two very similar titles, and how subtle differences make one of them moral and the other not, sometime in the near future.
Avian Overlord | September 24, 2020 at 2:52 pm
This is going to be the look back at AuZtralia, isn't it?
Dan Thurot | September 24, 2020 at 4:38 pm
Wow, good memory!
Thanks for responding. While I'm still ehh on the CAH use I appreciate that you will be writing more in depth on the topic and not letting it just hang there.
samuelvriezen | September 24, 2020 at 8:09 am
Well that was kind of effective, ordered it right away!
(And I was planning not to add any games to my list for the rest of the year…)
Glad to hear it, Samuel. Hope you enjoy it. Let us know how it treats you!
Detournemented | September 24, 2020 at 10:45 am
Excellent review. I'm fascinated with the idea of combining the widely used "risk/reward" mechanic with mitigation and moral decision spaces. Having your lust for VP's, tied up with tangible moral costs, makes for some seriously crunchy game play. Certainly, an under used concept in the cardboard world.
Games like "The Cost" move to push gaming into another realm, one where active play can spur philosophical conversation and explore challenging subjects in the frame of their historical context. Again, putting yourself in the shoes of the "evil capitalist" in a rule set that does not gloss over the human costs in your drive towards profits, opens the mind towards exploring alternative economic principals.
I've actually been kicking around a design for a similar games to the "The Cost" based upon off shore oil drilling for a few years. I was working on a way to include propaganda and legal mechanics into the game to help "cover up" disasters caused by greed. Maybe someday I will see it through.
Sounds like a hoot! Hopefully you'll find the time and/or inspiration to finish it.
Thomas Romanelli | September 24, 2020 at 2:37 pm
I really enjoyed the way you presented your opinions by examine the nature of CAH and The Cost- it was very thought-provoking.
As I had written elsewhere, I no longer play CAH because I ultimately recognized that it was a very insubstantial game, let alone one marred by some decidedly offensive content. Paradoxically, while I accept your word at face value that The Cost is superior in every way (and offers a gaming experience that seemingly avoids the uncomfortable content of CAH), I will likely never buy it.
I disagree that The Cost is a "moral game"- it's merely a candid simulation of economic efficiency that does not prioritize the value of human lives. Please forgive my ignorance because I haven't played the game, but per the rules (which I have read) the goal is no different than other title from a myriad of genres: The player who ends the game with the most money wins. Is it possible to win with both the most money and the least fatalities? The section on game end scoring suggests it is:
"However, the players should now take a look at the countries and their player boards. What happened? Is there really a "winner"? Has anyone produced no deaths while mining and milling? Did someone care to mine and mill safely?"
Is it any surprise that a leader who makes decisions with potentially lethal consequences, but is simultaneously insulated from the harm of those consequences, will more likely than not view the subsequent casualties as "the cost of doing business"? Unfortunately, I think most of us have already recognized the normalization of this behavior across multiple industries. I don't believe The Cost is telling me anything new in this regard, despite the solid gameplay that supports its inquisitive approach.
I'm not quite sure how I would entice my gaming group to attempt this title, and I'm trying to think of the "elevator summary" I would deliver that would make them look forward to discovering The Cost's gameplay. I do agree that this is an important game, in so far that it offers the potential for individuals to consider profound social issues and examine our attitudes about them. I would love to have you compare The Cost to other "edgy games" like Meltwater or Tomorrow.
Great review! Thank you again.
samuelvriezen | September 24, 2020 at 4:11 pm
It may be good to find an alternative for the adjective "moral". That has a preachy connotation. It seems that this game is concerned with being explicit about, as well as investigating, immoral decisions. So it allows for, and I guess, stimulates, structural political reflection on its subject matter, while not taking up an explicit position about it, leaving that to the players.
And of course the interesting question is not so much whether asbestos is good (it's not) or whether the asbestos industry is good (it's not). There are more interesting questions to think about. How come something we can all easily agree on to be bad could have been going on until, in fact, today in some places – how does that work?
"Moral" definitely has a preachy connotation! But I'm doing my darnedest to recenter it as an evaluative lens for critique. There is a very good chance I'll fail in this regard, at which point I'll be falling back on words like "honest."
I can see why it would be good to have the possibility of a criticism that can address ethical issues. I just wonder if "moral" does the job, since ultimately that has to depend on your morals, which I might not share, even though we play the same game. However a game may have the power to force us to examine the morality of certain choice structures by making their operation explicit.
Maybe such a game could be called "critical"? I mean in the sense of offering a critique of some political phenomenon by making explicit how under certain circumstances choices get made. That would also cover those chalk lines; the point of a critique is precisely to render those chalk lines that had become invisible again visible.
Ah, but the subjectivity of a moral critique is part of its appeal, in particular because all critiques are inherently subjective anyway! I may write about this sometime in the future, since we're diving into schools of critique most people won't have heard of.
samuelvriezen | September 25, 2020 at 10:21 am
Fair enough, and in any case I welcome any form of criticism that takes political, ethical and moral questions in gaming seriously!
Thanks for your thoughts, Thomas!
One point of clarification on my end — "moral" is sure an odd word, isn't it? When talking about board games, there are so many that omit exactly what you mentioned, a degree of "candid speech" about their topics. Colonialism is often talked about as the prime offender, since it's easy to see the chalk outlines where native or subaltern populations should have been. Over time, however, those omissions gradually become the norm, until even the chalk outlines are absent.
Which is why I regard games like The Cost as moral. A less cantankerous word might be "honest." Even though the game doesn't batter us over the head like some morality play, it permits us to see the chalk outlines that most games omit.
And I'll gladly take your request into consideration! A comparison of edgy games might make for an interesting topic. I'll have to kick around the idea and see what falls out.
Are you using "moral" as "has a moral argument about its topic" or "doesn't shy away from the ugly parts of its topic"? They're not quite the same thing, and it seems a bit unclear.
I'm using it in the sense of moral criticism, a school of critique that asks whether a work's purpose is worthy of its means.
Avian Overlord | September 25, 2020 at 10:02 pm
I think another factor in board games and morality is that games are a space where a lot of morals are suspended. Werewolf would be very boring if we didn't suspend the rule about not telling malicious lies during the game, for example.
True! But the same is true of many artistic works. When Johan Huizinga wrote about the magic circle, the principal application of his statements was for "play," but not necessarily for games, and he compared his application to other cultural activities. We also understand the relevance of a magic circle when reading fiction, for example, where we can sympathize or even identify with characters or behaviors we would normally be repulsed by.
Emphasizing my previous disclaimer that I have not played the game but only read the rules, I didn't have the impression that The Cost's gameplay effectively triggers the kind of important questions about how universally harmful industries are tolerated for so long. What few questions are proposed are found in very limited game end scoring section, and the rhetorical question "Is there really a winner?" carries all the weight of an afterthought.
I'm still thinking about how I would "sell" this experience to my gaming group (a group of medical professionals who are already pretty jaded about the industry they work within). An engaging, economic engine-builder with a sobering message might convince them to try it once, but I wonder how others might assess the replayability of The Cost.
I will say that The Cost has proved fantastically replayable for my group. It's so player-driven, with so many intertangled incentives, that it really benefits from a handful of plays.
Thomas Romanelli | September 25, 2020 at 7:43 am
Sir, you have changed my mind. I believe I will seek out this game and see what unfolds from the experience. Thanks for that! 🖖
I hope you enjoy it! Let us know if it flies or flops for your group!
samuelvriezen | October 25, 2020 at 6:13 pm
Well, now I have played a few runs of The Cost. It's a good game, plays fast, is surprisingly subtle in strategic and tactical possibilities – especially the action phase shows some nicely hidden depths.
And I think I can see why you could call this a 'moral' game, maybe more than other qualifications. Indeed it forces you to consider moral questions about capitalism, reduced to questions about greed and efficacy and death.
Politically, though, I'm not yet fully sure what the game is teaching us. I mean, it can also be 'moral' in that it teaches us something about what looks like a morally more clean form of capitalism. It invites you to find business methods that will actually win against the crude strategies that kill a lot for a quick buck; it invites you to consider what a sustainable (to use a very today word) business operation looks like.
There's a morality in it, but it also hides a lot. Because what will those sustainable operations entail? They are very likely to be focused on transport – so, a capitalism of supply networks and long-distance trade [blue politics in the game] rather than industrial capital's siphoning off of labor-created surplus value [red politics]. Transport other parties' deathly goods, and your hands are clean. Also, supplying this stuff to the 'emerging markets' – that is, outsourcing deaths to developing countries – is made to look like the moral option. It helps develop them, right? Finally, the upshot of being a good asbestos producer rather than an evil one is that no country will ban asbestos, which feels a little awkward, too. That stuff should just plain out!
In short, it seems to me that the game does not really have space for viable alternative politics, and the moral model feels much like greenwashing.
I don't want to hold that against the game though. Only a euro worker placement game where you actually see what might happen to your workers will let you ask questions like those in the first place. That's an achievement, and it's a great game to play, too.
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W. T. Waggoner Ranch
LARGEST RANCH UNDER ONE FENCE
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Waggoner Store
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Oil Division
The W. T. Waggoner Estate is seeking a working relationship with an industry partner to further explore and develop the ranchlands. Approximately 160,000 acres of the 560,000 acres are proven prolific oil properties. Very few test wells have penetrated the remaining 400,000 acres. The South and Western portions of the ranch are within the shelf and slope regions of the carbonate platform where the application of new seismic technology tied to solid geological models will lead to a very successful venture.
Our ranching operation includes, cattle, horses and the farm.
Our cattle herd consists of approximately 10,000 mother cows comprised of 60 percent Hereford and 40 percent Angus/Hereford and Brangus/Hereford cross. These cows are bred to Hereford, Angus, and Charolais bulls.
Our horses are American Quarter Horses and we raise them for our use on the ranch. Many carry the bloodline of Poco Bueno. Marketing is done through private treaty and production sales.
We farm approximately 25,000 that we use to graze cattle and raise crops for sale and internal use.
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Main interests of the company are ranching, oil, and approximately 26,000 acres in cultivation. The horses are bred for working ranch purposes,and many still carry the bloodline of the famous quarter horse, Poco Bueno;
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text:
Thursday 5th November 2015
PIANISTIC FIREWORKS with
Viv McLean, piano
2015 Season Sponsor:
Patricia Morgan Optician
Leatherhead Concert & Arts Society
Enrique Granados (1867-1916)
from Goyescas Op 11 (1911), subtitled Los majos enamorados (The Gallants in Love)
Quejas, o La Maja y el ruiseñor (Complaint, or the Maiden and the Nightingale)
from El Amor Brujo
Ritual Fire Dance (1915)
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
from 12 Études Op 25
No 1 in A Flat Aeolian Harp (1836)
No 12 in C Minor Ocean (1836)
Nocturne Op. Post. in C Sharp Minor (1830)
Lento con gran espressione
from 3 Waltzes Op 64 (1846-1847)
No 1 in D Flat Minute Waltz
Ballade No. 3 in A Flat Op 47 (1840-1841)
George Gershwin (1898-1937)
Although it was not installed and ready to play until February of this year, the Schiedmayer piano was donated to LMC almost exactly a year ago.
The piano has served this concert series well (and delighted one wedding couple).
Viv McLean is without doubt the player to excite our audience with the instrument.
Today's concert will be a tremendous tribute to the donor's generosity.
Viv McLean
Winner of the First Prize at the 2002 Maria Canals International Piano Competition in Barcelona, Viv McLean has performed at all the major venues in the UK as well as throughout Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA.
Viv's concerto work includes appearances with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Sinfonia Viva, Orchestra of the Swan, London Concert Orchestra, Scottish Concert Orchestra and the National Musicians' Symphony Orchestra.
Recent concerto highlights include Mozart K 467 with the English Chamber Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, Grieg with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Barbican, a tour of the USA with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performing Gershwin, Rachmaninov's 3rd Concerto with the RPO in Cambridge, Gershwin and Bernstein with the Hallé at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, and Beethoven's 5th Concerto with the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall.
Viv has performed chamber music with leading groups such as the Ysaÿe String Quartet, the Sacconi String Quartet, Ensemble 360, the Galliard Wind Ensemble and the Leopold String Trio and has collaborated with musicians such as Natalie Clein, Marianne Thorsen, Daniel Hope, Lawrence Power, Eijin Nimura, Phillip Dukes, Matthew Sharp, Kate Gould, Guy Johnston, Richard Dubugnon, David Le Page, Wayne Marshall, Christopher Warren-Green, Owain Arwell Hughes, David Charles Abell, Carl Davis, and Marvin Hamlisch.
Viv McLean has performed at festivals including the Cheltenham International Festival and Harrogate Festival in the UK, the International Beethoven Festival, the Mecklenburg Festival and the Kultur Kreis Festival in Germany, the Melle Festival and Festival de Saintes in France, the Vinterfestspill i Bergstaden in Norway and the Musik vid Kattegatt Festival in Sweden.
Viv studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Hamish Milne where he held the Hodgson Fellowship and was made an Associate of the Royal Academy in 2005. He made his Wigmore Hall recital debut through winning the Friends of the Royal Academy Wigmore Award. Whilst studying at the Academy, he was the piano winner at the Royal Overseas-League Music Competition and was selected as one of three winners of the National Federation of Music Societies' Young Artists Competition, leading to various recitals and concerto appearances throughout Great Britain.
Viv has recorded regularly for BBC Radio 3 since making his recital debut through the BBC Radio 3 Young Artists Forum scheme and has also recorded recitals for Classic FM, WDR Radio in Germany, Radio France, ABC Radio in Australia, NRK Radio in Norway and for the Sky Arts television channel. His commercial releases include recordings for such labels as Sony Classical Japan, Naxos, Nimbus and the RPO label.
The pianist Viv McLean seemed exceptional to me; he astonished us with his musical maturity and extraordinary sonority. Le Monde (Paris)
At the Festival de Melle, Viv McLean revealed extraordinary originality, superb simplicity, and fingers of steel hidden behind muscles of velvet. He is an otherworldly young man - he plays with the genius one finds in those who know how to forget themselves, naturally placing themselves at the right point to meet the music, this mystery of the moment.
Le Monde (Paris)
The pianist Viv McLean never faltered, spewing molten lava. The Times (London)
The fluent technique and brilliance of the interpreter were impressive, he played with insight and the greatest sensitivity. General Anzeiger (Bonn)
The listener was struck by the sustained level of technical mastery. Viv McLean performed with his mind as well as his hands. Malta Sunday Times
Fireworks from the Keyboard
"Remember, remember, the fifth of November."
Everything by memory,
not a single written note to his aid –
he removed the shelf and desk beforehand,
baring all the strings in their full range.
Without safety net, he treads a tightrope;
with supreme confidence
he lets the music rule him,
surrenders completely to its momentum.
Forecast pianistic fireworks
raised our expectations in advance;
but with slow and liquid intensity
Granados initiates his programme –
with furrowed brow and total absorption
he crouches yet lower,
coaxing fingers caress keys,
tap into that well of emotion.
Then Ritual Fire Dance, sorcerer,
explodes the arena with magic.
Chopin in all his moods
fills the arched space through nimble fingers.
(Minute Waltz – surely no faster?
The name is myth, not fact.)
Reviews from the Press:
steel and velvet; spewing lava
amplified the adjectives.
His fleeting facial angles, never still,
tilt of shining scalp and pointed chin,
join the flourish of his flailing arms,
as Rhapsody in Blue concludes his play
(memorised, but style with scope to improvise),
elicits images of licking flames and thunder
on this iconic anniversary.
Peter Horsfield 5/11/2015
Inspired by the lunchtime piano recital given at Leatherhead Methodist Church on 5th November 2015 by Viv McLean. Viv first performed here accompanying wind players in October 2014.
Iconic anniversary because this was indeed Fireworks, Bonfire, or Guy Fawkes Night, when the English remember the failed Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605.
Concert at Home
If you are unable to come along to today's concert, here instead is a selection of links to recordings of the same or similar works for your listening enjoyment.
Viv McLean opens today's concert with The Maiden and the Nightingale, by Granados. Let's listen to an excellent recording of Spanish pianist Alfredo Armero playing the work in Barcelona's Academia Marshall :
Next we hear the Ritual Fire Dance from De Falla's ballet-opera El amor brujo (Love, the magician).
If you haven't heard Viv McLean's playing before, this performance from Les Invalides, Paris, by Mauricio Nader will give you some sense of the energy, the vitality they bring to their playing.
And, as we are an audience that has come to appreciate the accordion over the last twelve months, you will find, on the right, a performance of the same work on piano accordion, by Nick Ariondo.
This is a first for us - a man playing an electric keyboard. I particularly like his Guiness coaster. Still, it's a pretty good recording of Chopin's Étude Aeolian Harp. Should you prefer your Chopin in a more traditional vein, then here's a stunning Russian television recording of Arthur Rubinstein, at the Moscow Conservatory in October 1964:
We have set the bar rather high now, so for a performance of Chopin's Océan we turn to Vladimir Horowitz:
Chopin's Nocturne wrote two Nocturnes in C sharp minor. This is the one written in 1830 and published posthumously in 1870. Keeping up the high standards we have set for ourselves, here is a recording by Vladimir Ashkenazy:
Have you ever fancied sitting with your eyes level with the lowest notes of the piano and admiring the wizardry that ensues ? Well, here's your chance as Lang Lang plays Chopin's Minute Waltz during a break in rehearsals for Radio Boston Radio in the city's Symphony Hall.
Next we hear Yuja Wang playing Chopin's Ballade No 3 in A flat, for a lunchtime concert at LSO St Lukes, on London's Old Street. If you're curious about the LSO St Luke's project this wikipedia article is a good starting point.
There really is a great deal of fun to be had with Gershwin's celebrated Rhapsody in Blue, do explore youtube to find your own favourites. Sticking with the piano only idea of today's concert, here are two versions.
To the left you will hear Sara Davis Buechner in a live, and wonderfully lively, performance for solo piano.
To the right you will find a recording by the piano duo of Donald Ryan (father) and Barron Ryan (son)
from their CD Ryan & Ryan Face to Face (even though they seem to be seated back to back).
We hope you have enjoyed your Concert at Home
Although it was not installed and ready to play until February of this year,
the Schiedmayer piano was donated to LMC almost exactly a year ago.
It has served this concert series well (and delighted one wedding couple).
What a tremendous tribute to our donor today's concert has been.
Previous THURsday
Timothy Ridout, viola
Amiran Zenaishvili, piano
following thursday
2015 Season Finale:
Atéa Wind Quintet
Patricia Morgan Optician - 2015 Season Sponsor


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It's a waxy leather, highly suited to footwear, bags and cases and outdoor use such as in bushcraft projects, where its natural appearance is ideal.
This leather has an attractive creased surface texture and it also has a 'pull-up' which means that it becomes a lighter colour when folded or scratched, adding to its character over time.


text:
Today: Neko Case.
Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
Edan Lepucki March 4, 2009 | 7 books mentioned 3
Middle Cyclone, the new album by my favorite redheaded crooner, Neko Case, was released yesterday. At the time of this writing, I've listened to the album twice as I worked on my novel, and then I repeated a few songs so that I could dance and swoon around the apartment.
My friend Robin Benway, fellow Neko Case-lover, and author of the music-centric, young adult novel Audrey, Wait!, pointed me to this piece in Paste Magazine: "17 Things I Love, by Neko Case." In the article, Case lists the books she read while making her record, including Watership Down by Richard Adams, What It Is by Lynda Barry, and Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. I love this literary insight into Case's gorgeous, passionate music, and the combination of authors does seem to translate into something Neko Case-ish. (Starting with that rabbit world…)
Perhaps when I'm done with my novel, I'll write a list of the albums I played as I wrote it. I have a feeling Middle Cyclone will make an appearance (along with Case's previous album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.) I'm curious if Neko Case, New Order, Beirut, Songs: Ohia, and silence (lots of silence, actually, as I revise), will reveal anything about my book. Any thoughts? And, for the writers out there, what do you listen to, if anything, as you work?
Edan Lepucki is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.
Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music #2: Haunted By Bob Dylan
Andrew Saikali February 3, 2009 | 7 books mentioned 1 3 min read
Whenever I tell someone that my favorite songwriter is Bob Dylan, the response I usually get is some kind of respectful acknowledgment of his status as a lyricist. And there's no question that Dylan has written some of the most extraordinary lyrics – depending on the period, and on his mood – they're wise and weary, playful and inventive, surreal, enigmatic, sometimes inscrutable. Sometimes they're familiar but then they twist in surprising ways. Rarely are they banal. Rarely are they boring. Even when writing a love song, Dylan finds new language and new ways to express the most familiar feelings of all. So, yes, a great lyricist. Whole books have been written, whole careers launched, with discussion of the lyrics of Bob Dylan. But reading Bob Dylan and listening to Bob Dylan are two completely different experiences. And it's his melodies, vocal phrasing and musical arrangements that lift these masterful words off the page, animating them, haunting them, imbuing them with mystery. Consider the album John Wesley Harding. Recorded in Nashville, just as 1967 was giving in to 1968, just a few months after recording The Basement Tapes, those legendary home recordings that would begin popping up on bootlegs in the late 60s. The Basement Tapes retained much of the surreal imagery of the 1965-66 albums, but without the amphetamine rush, and without the grandeur. The Basement Tapes (recorded with members of what would soon be The Band) came across as looser, playfully laconic. And a year or so after John Wesley Harding, Dylan would be back in Nashville, recording Nashville Skyline. Lovely in its own way, full of country ballads and country honk, "Lay Lady Lay" and "Nashville Skyline Rag." Formal, a very specific style governing the album; lyrically modest, straightforward, voiced by a Dylan no one had really heard before or since. So then: John Wesley Harding, sandwiched between two quite different and unusual projects, sounding like neither. An acoustic album, but surprisingly fast, focused, tight. Urgent drums pushing forward, but not frilly. Acoustic guitar and occasional piano and bass. Harmonica sometimes taking the lead, not just coming in for punctuation. So, an acoustic record, but not folk. Full of muted rock drums, so rock in an unusual way, but not electrified. And despite its Nashville roots, not country. And definitely not "country rock." And through it all, a voice sounding not quite like any other Dylan voice. Clear, every syllable mattering, mysterious, even a bit pinched and restrained. Tight-lipped. The lyrics draw from the old west; there is biblical imagery; there are story-songs, morality tales. Instead of surreal and symbolic, the lyrics are mysterious. Information is withheld. The mystery is in the action, in what the characters are doing. Much is left hanging, including the "why." Again, tight-lipped lyrics delivered in a tight-lipped voice. On some songs: the title track, "As I Went Out One Morning" and "All Along the Watchtower," the urgency is pushed through by rapid bass and drumbeats. Rapid, but quiet. On "All Along the Watchtower," the harmonica is front and centre, setting up the song, in the same way an electric guitar might in a more conventional rock arrangement. This was before Jimi Hendrix re-imagined the song so completely that subsequent live versions by Dylan abandoned the muted mystery of the John Wesley Harding original for a more extroverted electrified expression. Same words, still ominous and potent, but quite different from the more subtle original. On the more subdued tracks: "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" and " I Pity The Poor Immigrant," the hushed beauty of the vocal melody steers the songs. The muted instrumentation and voice cloak the whole experience, obscuring it, letting the meaning hang. "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" is more about structure than melody, packing a great deal of narrative into its economical frame. The instrumentation is deliberately repetitive, and after a while, the hypnotic familiarity of it allows it to almost recede from your attention, letting your mind focus on the story. By the end of it, you feel you've been listening to a novel, a morality tale clocking in at a mere five minutes. One of the best songs on the album, "Drifter's Escape," isn't as long, but it's just as complete. A tiny, enigmatic, short story. Courtroom drama, social satire and what could either be divine intervention or blind luck, depending on your worldview, all rolled into one. John Wesley Harding is not a rollicking, joyous album. The last two songs: "Down Along The Cove" and "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" are lighter fare, more affable, but that only serves to put the rest of the album in stark contrast. It's a strange, unnerving album, and it leaves you with more questions than answers, and it haunts you long after the final note is played.
Andrew Saikali | 7 books mentioned 1 3 min read
Why We Wu
Jacob Lambert June 25, 2010 | 7 books mentioned 6 3 min read
More than any other modern act—with the exceptions, perhaps, of Miles Davis and B.B. King—the Clan has laid claim to nearly every corner of its genre.
Jacob Lambert | 7 books mentioned 6 3 min read
What's Not to Like? The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Emily Colette Wilkinson July 23, 2009 | 7 books mentioned 2 3 min read
Oh, to be so winsome as The Pains of Being Pure at Heart! All aspects of the unwieldily named indie pop quartet are uniformly captivating – their music, their lyrics, their persons, their demeanor on stage and in interviews – and newspapers and blogs from their home city (New York) to LA and San Fran are quite rightly singing the praises of their self titled debut album. Although I've always sympathized with Elvis Costello's view of music criticism ("Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."), my profound affection for The Pains prompts me to violate my own prohibition against mansard roof waltzes.The greatest pleasure of The Pains is that they have made pop music something real again; they (and Vampire Weekend, with a very different vibe) remind me that pop can be more than over-produced plastic-y tween cotton candy. All of The Pains' songs have a bright, quick, melodic quality that will give children of the late eighties and early nineties alt music scene intense bouts of nostalgia and deja vu. For me, The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy album, particularly the song "Just Like Honey" is the dominant topnote in The Pains musical bouquet, but their music is also strongly redolent of The Cure, The Smiths, and more sythesizer-y 80's stuff like New Order (the lovely Peggy Wang plays the sythesizer for Pains as well as sings whispery and suggestive back-up vocals). There are also echoes of The Stone Roses (songs like "Elephant Stone" and "This is the One"), the short-lived 1990s DC band Black Tambourine ("Throw Aggi off the Bridge"), and other 90s bands like Catherine Wheel, Moose, Pale Saints, Lush, and Chapterhouse. The Pains lyrics remind me of Belle and Sebastian's dark school stories and psychological subtlety. (Some part of me thinks there might also be a Joy Division component to their sound too, but that is likely because the Pains lead singer Kip Berman has a very slight physical resemblance to the ill-fated Ian Curtis.)As with the Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey," the Pains music has a wall of sound-y feel: the instrumentals are thick and echo-y and encompassing, particularly the guitar parts (at their show this week in LA, they had an extra guitarist onstage to accompany lead singer and guitarist Berman). The instrumentation engulfs and softens the band's vocals and lyrics (a trademark of the late 80's sub-genre dubbed shoegazing) and their high-energy, happy, heavily melodic sound belies and muffles the sinister tales their songs narrate: "A Teenager in Love" is about "a teenager in love with Christ and heroin" (for months I'd thought, naively, that the lyric was "in love with Christ in Heaven"), "This Love is F***ing Right!" is about incest, "The Tenure Itch" – a "Don't Stand So Close to Me" for our time – is about a young girl having a self-destructive affair with a professor:He makes corrections, you shut the blindsYou're talking less and less,But the words aren't hard to find.His last suggestion, it makes you ill,Still one more lesson leaves you twisting to his will.But you don't feel like this is what the song is about while you're listening to it casually. The sparkly chorus, "Every night, he comes and goes again," is really quite sinister and depressing once you know what the song is about, but because it takes pretty concentrated listening to make out the lyrics, I felt only delightfully energized by it the first 10 or so times I heard it. What I think is their best song, "Young Adult Friction," is an ambiguous account of a sexual encounter in a library:I never thought I would come of age,Let alone on a moldy page.You put your back to the spinesand you said it was fine if there's nothing really left to say.Now that you feel, you say it's not real.The end of the song describes both participants as damaged by the encounter (possibly rape?), but, again, you wouldn't know it listening to the music, nor watching the band's charming low-budget music video.This cognitive dissonance itself – the incongruity between the Pains music and their lyrics – is really satisfying: All of the adolescent sensual pleasures of pop concealing the menacing complexities and perversities of adulthood.The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are touring right now through the fall with shows all over the US and Canada as well as a stint in Europe. They're playing small general admission clubs, mostly, and the tickets are cheap and well worth it. They're touring with the LA band the Champagne Socialists who have a striking 50s and early 60s vibe that's also worth a listen (and a look: their lead singer is transfixing in fishnets and vintage hotpants). For the tour schedule, tickets, free downloads, and more visit the Pains site.[Photo: Annie Powers]
Emily Colette Wilkinson | 7 books mentioned 2 3 min read
The Weird Sisters: CocoRosie's Grey Oceans
Emily Colette Wilkinson May 11, 2010 | 7 books mentioned 8 6 min read
CocoRosie's new album, Grey Oceans, comes out on Wednesday. It's their fourth album and their first release from SubPop. Through Wednesday, SubPop is streaming the album for free at SoundCloud. For those who don't know CocoRosie, they're a freak-folky, trip-hoppy, fantastically costumed, often cross-dressed, incestuously close and otherworldly pair of sister singers and musicians. If Björk and Billie Holliday had twin girls, they might sound something like CocoRosie (likewise, the offspring of the Cocteau Twins and Bessie Smith). There are also shades of Cat Power, Portishead, and the classical-folk-hip-hop work of the young singer and violin virtuoso Emily Wells in the duo's work.
The story of the band's genesis has become something of a legend and it's integral to their mystique. No matter who's telling it, it sounds like a fairytale and I think it's better told as such:
Once upon a time there were two beautiful sisters named Sierra and Bianca Casady. Their mother, Christina, was Syrian and Cherokee and maybe a little Gypsy too and their father was a creepy Iowa farmer infatuated with Native American religion and Voodoo who took his young daughters to New Age ceremonies where all of the adults got scarily wacked out on peyote. He eventually became some kind of shaman. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because of other obscure evils, the beautiful Gypsy mother left her husband and spent her daughters' childhood years wandering through New Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii, and California, sometimes enrolling her daughters in school and sometimes not. The girls liked wearing costumes, casting spells, and making up stories about imaginary lands.
At some point in this wandering, the sisters were separated. The eldest, Sierra (also called Rosie), ended up in Paris studying voice and opera. The younger, Bianca, also called Coco, ended up in Brooklyn, where she studied philosophy and sometimes went to ironic "Kill Whitey" hipster parties. Eventually, Bianca got tired of the hipsters and decided to travel abroad. Her first stop was Paris where, after ten years, she was reunited with her beloved sister Sierra in Sierra's tiny garret flat. There, the girls shut themselves in and recreated their childhood world: dressing up, making up songs and stories.
Bianca had brought some sort of archaic recording device to Paris and the sisters recorded some of their songs from the strange and distant land of their private imaginary world sitting in the bathtub (because it made a nice echo), playing guitars, harps, snake-charming flutes, wind-up music boxes and electronic children's toys, jangling chains and coins, thrumming their fingers on tin cans. The homemade demo that resulted from this bathroom session found its way into the hands of Touch & Go Records producer Corey Rusk. He couldn't stop listening to it. He found Sierra and Bianca, signed them, and together they released the songs under the title La Maison de Mon Rêve (2004). CocoRosie was born.
It's quite a tale and you won't find a straighter version of it. (The Casady sisters aren't much for anything that's not tinged with fancy or fairydust, as Fernanda Eberstadt's excellent profile of the band in the New York Times Magazine a couple of years back illustrates in great detail.) And the fantasy and fairytale continues in their music.
The sisters' private mythology is equal parts Victorian childhood and modern Gothic. They are innocents who know about the dark side (miscarriages, incest, racism, disfigured and battered women, cemeteries in the back yard) but still believe in angels, fairies, God, St. Nicholas. This, combined with their ingenious use of found sounds, strange and improvised instruments, samples, echoes, overlaid vocals, their mix of the primitive and nostalgic (feline yowls, a recording of their mother chanting in her native Cherokee, tinkly old music boxes), classical (Sierra's wordless operatic trills and wails), and hypermodern (synthesizers, beat boxes, electronic children's toys, and talk boxy/auto-tune voice effects) might convince you that the Spiritualists were right and that what you're listening to is really a recording of the voices of the dead disrupting a radio broadcast or a trip hop D.J.'s set.
This haunting, scary-pretty, Weird Sisters siren singing is not for everyone. It tends to make lovers or haters. My husband believes that the singing of these madwomen in the bathtub might be put in the mix with death metal, the Barney song, and looped recordings of crying babies, as a tool of interrogation and torture. But I'm a lover: CocoRosie's bathtub album had me at, "Jesus loves me/But not my wife/Not my nigger friends/Or their nigger lives." Hearing this track, "Jesus Loves Me," from La Maison de Mon Rêve (2004) was one few jaw-dropping experiences of my recent musical life—and it wasn't just because of the lyrics.
If you listened to the song out of context, as I did the first time, you might think that you'd stumbled upon an early recording of a backwoods white supremacist version of the original 19th century hymn—except that the very white Sierra, who sings lead vocals on this track, sounds kind of like Billie Holiday. (Incidentally, Sierra also sounds like a 90-year-old bedlamite, and I say this with the utmost respect.) This haunting blackvoice inflects many of La Maison de Mon Rêve lyrics. And not only can CocoRosie sound black, and occasionally use a kind of Gone With The Wind/Huck Finn Southern black dialect ("dat fo sho", "all dem kears"), their lyrics also mimic the idioms of early blues. "I swear I won't call no coppa,/If I'm beat up by my poppa," Bessie Smith sang in her 1923 "T'Ain't Nobody's Bizness if I Do." On the bluesy, beat-boxed "By Your Side," Sierra, with the same casual tolerance of domestic violence, sings "I'll wear your black eyes,/Bake you apple pies," in a voice that, again, you might mistake for a quavery late Lady Day. This isn't Zooey Deschanel, America's milque-y indie sweetheart, giving "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" a try (as good as her retro girlpop stuff for She & Him is, her version of this song feels a little thin).
The sisters' songs are unsettling and otherworldly and, I find, totally addictive and transporting. Their first album is still my favorite. In spite of its undeniable affections and stylizing, it still has a naively original quality, and for all of its contrivances it doesn't feel contrived–kind of like Michel Gondry's film La Science des Rêves (The Science of Sleep). The child's imaginary world/children's art project atmosphere feels authentic and touching and wonderful, if also fragile and a little disturbed.
The sisters' second and third albums, Noah's Ark (2005) and The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn (2007) have been increasingly polished and produced and the found sounds, musical styles pastiched and electronic effects have multiplied—though the unearthly feral child/fairyland vibe, the suggestions of unwholesome sexuality (the cover of Noah's Ark, for example, depicts three unicorns in what appears to be a sodomy conga line) , and the invocations of a quasi-Christian fallenness that inflected La Maison remain creepily entrenched in their mythology.
And so it is on in their latest album, Grey Oceans, their fourth full-length release and their SubPop debut:
Baby girl don't you cry
Momma's gonna buy you a glass eye
And it will glimmer like starlight
Sierra sings on "R.I.P. Burn Face", which is my favorite track on the album. It's also the most coherently melodic, a lament for those lost at sea, or possibly for a disfigured girl who's drowned herself. (Coherent narratives have never been the signature of CocoRosie lyrics and they aren't now.) The album's first three tracks, "Trinity's Crying," "Smokey Taboo," and "Hopscotch" (which features Bianca's in her signature babyvoice singing a kind of vaudeville-y, children's tap chorus-line tune of the sort that becomes maddeningly lodged in the brain), are beautifully arranged and mixed—really, all of the tracks are. But there's something a bit less personal about this album: Grey Oceans won't send you headlong down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass, as previous albums have done.
This one feels more generic, more manufactured in its polish. And, worse than generic, several of the tracks on which Bianca sings in her uncanny baby voice sound like counterfeit Björk songs. The title track, "Grey Oceans," is like this. The only difference is that Bianca Casady doesn't have Björk's ability to break and balance the fey child's patter with lusty, athletic yelling-singing. On "Fairy's Paradise" Bianca sings the opening lines, "He draws near the periphery,/In disbelief on delivery," but most of her r's and l's sound like w's (He dwaws neaw the pewifewy,/In disbeweif on dewivewy) and it's, well, it's just ridiculous. "Undertaker," possibly an autobiographical song about the obscurely evil Casady father, features a haunting intro and coda sample of the Casady sisters' mother chanting in Cherokee. It's quite something but, again, Bianca's parody Björk voice just doesn't work, as it doesn't quite in "The Moon Asked The Crow" (in spite of its catchy hip-hoppy beat).
Bianca's baby-voice can work ("Armageddon" on Noah's Ark, is great), but here it's brought to the fore and carries the lead vocals on most tracks. And it sounds like Bianca's playing it up more, distorting her pronunciation to a clownish degree, often while singing melodramatic autobiographical lyrics, and what was once uncanny verges into the absurd.
But absurdity is not the sum of this album. It's got intimations of the signature CocoRosie strange beauty as well. I am glad to have two such outlandish, otherworldly fantasists in the world and making art.
I don't listen to music when I write, but if forced I would pick something complex but unobtrusive…in a word Mozart.
Usually nothing, but since I have found Pandora I've been listening to a channel full of weird dark artists that I've never heard of. Music that you don't recognize is both surprising but intrusive, white noise like an indecipherable foreign language.
I did actually write a short story recently though at the same time that I listened to npr's early release of Middle Cyclone…
Molly M. says:
Lately, while writing, I've been listening to The Dirty Three's "Horse Stories." The songs are wordless and wild, and I repeat a few of the songs over and over and over again until I, too, am a horse.
Pump Down the Volume: On Writing With Background Music
Jacob Lambert September 28, 2015 | 7 books mentioned 13 5 min read
As I write this, I'm listening to the new Beach House album. This is not because I like the new Beach House album (although I do), or because it gives me the chance to say so, thus making me sound slightly cooler (although it might, in a desperate sort of way) or because I'm plugging the record (although it is great, if you enjoy the band's drunk-on-a-beanbag effect).
I'm listening to it because I'm writing — an activity that for me, in recent years, has demanded musical accompaniment. Far from being a background diversion — something to make kitchen chores a little less soul-killing — I've come to believe that the music I listen to while writing bears a definite, if ineffable, relationship to the words that wind up on the screen. This paragraph might not carry the woozy dreaminess of a Beach House song — but how would it have sounded if, while typing, I'd been listening to Public Enemy? Or Def Leppard? Or nothing at all?
In 1999, Nine Inch Nails's The Fragile was released to a flood of media attention. This was when a new CD could seem like a cultural event, and, as such, though I didn't particularly care about Trent Reznor, I read dutifully about the album. And although I've largely forgotten The Fragile — I think it gave me a headache — one nugget from its publicity blitz has stayed with me: Chuck Palahniuk was quoted as saying that he listened to Nine Inch Nails as he wrote Fight Club.
I remember being sort of shocked by this, not because it didn't make sense — one can certainly picture Palahniuk in a dim little room, gritting his teeth at the monitor, bashing out his story as Reznor screams at him — but because until then, I'd thought of writing as a monastic pursuit. Writing, to me, was Philip Roth in a cabin somewhere, the only sounds the tapping of his fingers and the wind rushing through the trees. That was the ideal. To write, you needed calm, and for calm, you needed silence.
Perhaps the image of Palahniuk mustering a novel against the shriek of industrial noise helped to change my view. Because not only do I no longer believe it, I've gone in the opposing direction: music is now as central to my writing as an idea and a comfortable chair. I now feel almost unhinged if I try to write without something playing to whisk my mind along. Music has become a brace that props up my thoughts, fences them off, prevents them from slipping away. Silence has come to feel like an unfamiliar field, with too much space to roam.
Along with Beach House, Boards of Canada — makers of beat-driven, dystopian electronic music — has lately been my brace of choice. Such sounds somehow hem me in and push my focus outward, into whatever I'm writing. When I need less help, some sort of jazz usually does the trick — with something buoyant like Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts scores reserved for the easiest days.
Which brings me back to my original question: what is that music — Boards of Canada's creepy soundscapes, John Coltrane's hard bop, Snoopy's dancing tunes — doing to the words?
I went online in search of answers, and was at first encouraged by what I found. A number of sites have devoted space to the topic, with pieces ranging from the listy ("10 Top Authors Share Their Secrets for Summoning the Muse") to the self-helpful (one Goodreads thread, "Listening to Music While Writing," sits under the "Struggling Writers" heading). There are endless suggestions for albums that will not only "summon the muse," but keep her with you: In a Silent Way, Music For Airports, anything by Philip Glass. No mention of Nine Inch Nails.
The cumulative effect of these posts was the feeling that, with the correct music, you can become the next Joyce Carol Oates, effortlessly meeting your daily quota of words. It's a tempting narrative, and one that fits with the Internet's culture of simple solutions: If you're having trouble with that short story, just put on some Brian Eno. Your latent genius will be unleashed.
But mixed in with all this good feeling were numerous studies and papers the results of which were both consistent and surprising. A New Jersey Institute of Technology study found that "background music significantly disrupted writing fluency, even though no response to the music was required." The explanation: "music may increase cognitive load because the brain has to handle the additional information." A University of Windsor study found that its subjects' "time-on-task was longest when music was removed." Another, from Indiana State University, on the "Mozart Effect" — the idea that classical music can somehow boost intelligence — found that "playing background music in the creative writing class had a significant improvement on the student's behavior, but not a significant improvement on the student's writing." In other words, music can provide the inner calm that I used to imagine in my Philip Roth fantasy. It just won't help me write the next American Pastoral.
Time's Annie Murphy Paul, in a synthesis of such studies, provided the most concise blow to my assumption of music's benefits: "Playing music you like can lift your mood and increase your arousal — if you listen to it before getting down to work. But it serves as a distraction from cognitively demanding tasks…when you need to give learning and remembering your full attention, silence is golden."
And on and on. If the science is correct, my Eno-loving peers and I may be deluding ourselves as to music's utility. We're most likely being too romantic. "Writing can get lonely," a Quora contributor wrote, "but when Moby is in my ears, it feels like he's on the journey with me." It's a charming sentiment. But maybe we're being too eager to make an unappealing task seem less so — the ice cream cone after the doctor's office — without any thought to the consequences. Maybe Boards of Canada is less of a brace and more of an anchor, slowing down a part of my mind that otherwise would be free. There's no way to prove that the things I've written would have been better had they been written in silence — but what if they could have been, even just a tiny bit? Though I'll never know, it's unsettling to think about.
It's equally unsettling, though, for me to picture a future in which I write in a totally quiet room, with no one "on the journey with me." The idea is as unappetizing to me as Palahniuk's habits once seemed. So what, then, to do? On the one hand, I have my habits and experience, my comfort with routine. On the other, studies that show that music is, at best, a nonfactor, and at worst, a hindrance. Hovering over both is the thought that I'm being unserious, the kid who can't get a flu shot without the promise of a mint-chip cone.
I'm not sure what to do. I'm now listening to Miles Davis's Someday My Prince Will Come. I've listened to this album, while writing or reading, close to 200 times. It's delicate and warm, gentle and easy. I've got the volume turned down low.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Jacob Lambert | 7 books mentioned 13 5 min read
Grad School Musical
Emily Colette Wilkinson February 5, 2008 | 7 books mentioned 4 3 min read
Continuing in the vein of the unwritten parrot dissertation, I share with you another great unwritten (even less written and conceived than Parrots, Pirates, and Prostheses): my screenplay about grad school life in the humanities. Well, about grad students in an English department, to be exact, because that's all I know. For the masses of high-school movies and TV shows (10 Things I Hate About You, Bring It On, Get Over It, Heathers, Sugar and Spice, The History Boys, American Pie, Virgin Suicides, My So-Called Life, Dead Poets' Society, School Ties, Freaks and Geeks, Aliens in America, Napoleon Dynamite, Pretty Persuasion, The O.C...), there are fewer about college (The Harvard Man, Legally Blonde, With Honors, Aubergine Espagnol, Rules of Attraction, Undeclared, Love Story, Brideshead Revisited, Old School, The Dreamers, Animal House, Sorority Boys), and virtually none about graduate school. In fact, the only one I can think of is Laurel Canyon, which concerns a grad student (Kate Beckinsale) and her medical resident husband (Christian Bale) once they have left the groves of academe. It's quite good but it deals more with the grad student as a genre of (repressed) person rather than exploring such creatures in their native habitat. The Emma Thompson movie Wit has a few grad school flashbacks and gets more at the tone I'd be going for, but it is hardly a movie about grad school. So, unless I am very much mistaken, the graduate student is a species that has been under-represented in cinema.Thus far in my efforts to amend this cultural oversight, I have, alas, only made up a long-list for the soundtrack. But the beauty of this list is that it can also serve as a primer or litmus test for those contemplating a Ph.D.: Ask yourself, "Do I want this to be the soundtrack of my life?" (Oh, I kid you not.)Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, Muddy WatersOxford Comma, Vampire WeekendAsk Me Anything, The Strokes ("I've got nothing to say…")Where Is My Mind?, The PixiesGet Me Away from Here, I'm Dying, Belle & SebastianVenus In Furs, The Velvet Underground ("taste the whip," indeed: What would graduate school be – and who would go – without masochism?) Hate, Cat Power ("But the ones who didn't make it/The ones who couldn't take it/So glad they made it out alive…")Poems, Tricky/Nearly GodGood Things, Sleater-Kinney ("Will it make me sick today?")I Am A Rock, Simon & GarfunkelElephant Gun, Beirut ("If I was young I'd flee this town…")Jack-Ass, BeckOffend In Every Way, The White StripesYou're No Good, Bob DylanCruel, CalexicoThere Is A Light That Never Goes Out, The Smiths (oh, the longing for socialization)Dumb, Nirvana (a heavy-handed choice, however, imposter syndrome is not to be underestimated: "I'm not like them, but I can pretend…")You're Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl), The White Stripes (lest you think the boys club vibe has been banished from the academy)History Song, The Good, The Bad, and The Queen ("If you don't know it now, then you will do…")Las Cruces Jail, Two Gallants ("…born to fail/Nobody come for to go my bail…")Campus, Vampire Weekend (this not-so-desolating one will be used in some sort of pastoral idyll scene)Furnace Room Lullaby, Neko Case (For the anxiety of influence: "I twisted you under and under to break you, I just couldn't breathe with your throne on my chest")We've Been Had, The WalkmenStop Whispering, Radiohead ("And the feeling is, that there's something wrong/ Cause you can't find the words, and I can't find the song")If I Could Talk I'd Tell You, The LemonheadsHelp Save the Youth of America, Billy BraggTime Bomb, RancidThe Racing Rats, The EditorsThis Job is Killing Me, The WalkmenUnder My Thumb, The Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger is your principal adviser; you are "the squirming dog who's just had her day")Shoot You Down, The Stone Roses (advisors again)The Other Way, Weezer (and again)The Boy With The Thorn in His Side, The SmithsA Million Ways, OK Go (ah, klonopin and cruelty!)Closer to Fine, Indigo Girls ("spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper and I was free" …only four years?)The Greatest, Cat PowerHolland, 1945, Neutral Milk HotelFuzzy, Grant Lee BuffaloLost Cause, BeckSave Me, Aimee MannSound good?
Can U Tell Me? Short Stories as Pop Songs
Tim Wirkus June 18, 2015 | 7 books mentioned 11 min read
As I've thought through the possible criteria for determining the literary equivalent of a pop song, I've thought of so many stories that fit the bill, stories that have gotten under my skin, stories that I have to share. Unable to resist that urge, I've put together a 'Thriller'-sized playlist of nine pop-musical short stories.
Tim Wirkus | 7 books mentioned 11 min read
Bird Lives: On Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning
Matt Hanson March 6, 2014 | 7 books mentioned 11 8 min read
I submit that the kind of place Parker holds within jazz tradition is a little like what you would get if you mixed Beethoven with Jimi Hendrix. He was a game changer.
Matt Hanson | 7 books mentioned 11 8 min read


To leave a book unread, usually in a pile of other such unread books on the floor, shelves or other surfaces.
From the Japanese words 'Tsumo', meaning 'a pile of' and 'doku', meaning 'to read'.
EDITOR'S CHOICE: top tip – makes a useful table, plant stand or chair.


Hāpai Te Hauora is calling for sensibility and improved focus on smoked tobacco cigarettes given its devastating history and continued harm on Māori health.
Last week the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation NZ spoke to Māori media using the ASH Year 10 Study that shows an increase in rangatahi (youth) experimenting with vaping devices from 20% in 2014 to 28% in 2016. Asthma and Respiratory Foundation NZ omitted from their story that of all those who experimented with e-cigarettes less than 3% are regular weekly or daily users.
National Tobacco Control Advocacy General Manager, Mihi Blair says "there is confusion out there around vaping and the statements made last week add to that confusion rather than bring any clarity or practical help on what we can do to reduce smoking harm"
"It is important that smoking reduction is where public health organisations place their weight and efforts, being distracted by stoned smurfs and unicorn flavourings is not helpful to reaching Smokefree 2025. The data did not link flavor or nicotine levels to youth experimentation"
Hāpai Te Hauora is the largest Māori public health group in Aotearoa and they are disappointed that strong statements have been used that are confusing to Māori and Pacific who may be trying to stop smoking. Tens of thousands of kiwi's have not been able to quit using traditional stop smoking services and so turn to vaping devices to stop smoking or reduce the number of cigarettes they smoke.
Blair says, "Smoking and other addictions are a serious public health issue for Māori that deserves comprehensive discussion and coverage. We need more Māori public health perspectives on vaping devices and products to be representing Māori voices on Māori media and Hāpai Te Hauora would welcome that invitation".
ASH NZ spokesperson Ben Youdan says "The pathways in and out of addiction are not straightforward." Youdan has shared with other public health organisations that the story misses the opportunity for more in-depth searching into why youth are trying vaping. "Is it because they want to get off smoked tobacco - like almost all adult vapers? And if never smokers are trying and going on to vape - is this offsetting the uptake of smoked tobacco?" says Youdan.
Hāpai Te Hauora are working to understand the vaping environment and has been working with Vape Vendors around New Zealand who are self-regulating to ensure good ethical practice is in place.
Blair adds, "The Vape Vendors have been open about their practice. Working with them is more beneficial to build better systems and regulations in place so that people who smoke have better access to this product to quit smoking tobacco.
Vape2Save founder Rebecca Ruwhiu-Collins says "Vaping is not the magic bullet for everyone to stop smoking, we know this. But as a practitioner in the field, in my experience I have seen high numbers of successful quitting using vape devices, this is why I set up Vape2Save three years ago."
Ruwhiu-Collins says "The ASH Year10 data on youth experimentation with vaping devices highlights important research gaps, these need to be studied so that we are not left with assumptions".
Hāpai Te Hauora acknowledges that the vaping industry has already grown and are seeking quality control from the industry for quality vaping products.
Blair says "there are good quality products out there, but cowboy vendors are also out there selling poor quality products to whānau. We must regulate to ensure all communities get the best vaping products to help them stop smoking".


text:
Home /Recent Post/Hindu fair focusing on conversions begins peacefully
Hindu fair focusing on conversions begins peacefully
ThisIndiaFebruary 19, 2011
By ucanews.com
Christians in central India have expressed relief as the first day of a Hindu festival passed peacefully.
"We are relieved that so far no untoward incident has happened on the first day," said Bishop Gerald Almeida of Jabalpur, whose diocese covers Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh state where the three-day festival is underway.
He told ucanews.com today that the administration has provided tight police security for Christian institutions in the district.
The Ma Narmada Samajik Kumbh (social fair of mother Narmada) began yesterday about 100 kilometers from the bishop's residence in Jabalpur.
Media reports suggested the fair aimed to convert tribal Christians to Hinduism.
Church officials had approached the state government and the High Court for security for their people and institutions in the district.
The administration has declared a holiday for schools in and around the venue and no vehicle is allowed within eight kilometers of the event. Media persons are also not allowed to enter.
State Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan joined Hindu religious leaders at the opening function.
According to some participants, several speakers accused Christians of using their charitable services to convert gullible tribal people.
They also criticized the Pope and made fun of the Old Testament narration of the creation, according to Father George Thomas, a local Catholic parish priest.
An exhibition at the venue displayed anti-Christian and anti-Muslim literature. Some accused Blessed Teresa of Kolkata of indulging in conversion.
"So far the Christians are safe, but we do not know what would happen in the next two-days," said Father Thomas.
Ashok Masih, local president of the Madhya Pradesh Isai Mahasangh (grand assembly of Christians in Madhya Pradesh), quoted unconfirmed reports to say that re-conversions of Christians are taking place at the fair.
Madhya Pradesh is among the Indian states that have banned religious conversion through force or allurement.
Bishop Almeida said Christians try their best to provide medical care and education to poor tribal people. "But we are being blamed of serving those whom nobody apparently wants to help," he added.
He asserted that the Church has not converted anyone through allurement or force as has been projected.
Christians, who form less than 1 percent of the state's population, have experienced sporadic violence since the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in December 2003
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Not quite sure what to get Mum for Christmas this year? Checked off everyone on the Santas list except that one friend, who is always so hard to buy for? We can help.
Extend your love to the mothers and babies in Sierra Leone by giving a small but meaningful gift. Donate for yourself, or give a donation gift on behalf of someone you love. Regular-giving can make an important difference to hundreds of lives in Sierra Leone.
This Christmas, we have a target to help 250 children be seen at Aberdeen Children's Clinic. We need your help.
By signing-up to regular giving on behalf of a friend or loved one, you can make an impactful difference for a child and their mother, for as little as $10 a month. This small but meaningful donation will give these children access to necessary healthcare at our clinic.
Your support in our Christmas appeal will help us help 250 children receive treatment at the Aberdeen Women's Centre giving them a better chance at life. Or, less than $2 per day will cover the cost for 12 women to safely give birth at the Aberdeen Women's Centre.
Your donation will give children and mothers access to necessary health care and continue to help our foundation improve maternal health and the creation of sustainable communities.
Our foundation endeavours to create long-lasting change in the communities in Sierra Leone, your continued support is fundamental.
Choose the amount you would like to donate this Christmas and make a difference that really counts.