Interview with Lankoff

Watch in horror as Allie, a good friend and Oberlin third-year Creative Writing major, interviews Lankoff about all things.

A: If you had to take one part of your body and transplant it onto another part of your body, what part would you transplant where?
L: That's silly.

A: It's not silly. It's interesting.
L: I would transplant my nostrils to my butt.

A: If you had to go on a date with any of the presidents of the United States, living or dead, which would it be? And what would the date be?
L: I would take Grover Cleveland out for brunch between his two terms and tell him that everything was going to be all right, that he'd be president again before he knew it. Then we'd cuddle.

A: Awwww.
L: Sure.

A: You're not very good at this.
L: This is the best interview I've ever done.

A: If you could be a Hamiltonian or Eulerian circuit, which would you be?
L: Hamiltonian. I avoid edges.

A: If you could have any Oberlin College professor turned into a dinosaur, and that dinosaur would be your steed that you could ride around on all the time, which professor? And what kind of dinosaur?
L: I would turn Bernard Motambo into a pterodactyl.

A: THAT'S THE PROFESSOR AND THE DINOSAUR OF WHICH I WAS THINKING!!!

That's all the time we have. What insight you, the reader, have gained!

Blueprints

90% of my free time goes to music: drumset, bass guitar, tabla, sitar, composition, Reason, gallivanting around campus beatboxing, screeching as loud as I can, thumb piano. Yesterday I found my 1/4" to 1/8" adapter, hooked my bass up to my Macbook, and made some terrible recordings. They're not worth listening to.

Here and here.

Mexican Radio

It's the time of the semester when radio shows on WOBC get rolling. This time around, in the frantic ten minutes before the midnight deadline, I applied for a metal show and my ceremonial Josh & Brendan have fluxuating attention spans tomfoolery.

I received both! O happy day! O joyous parshums!

"The Reeving Machine," a noise-assault wherein the listener's bones are liquified and centrifuged, shall be on Saturday nights/Sunday mornings from midnight until 1 AM. Playing the likes of The Locust, Ed Gein, Cattle Decapitation, and The Dillinger Escape Plan, I'll be kept busy changing the tracks every 43 seconds. The drumming should be fan-effing-tastic.

"Deepthroat Unicorn," an avante-garde/progressive rock/jazz/world mishmash, shall be on Wednesday afternoons from 4 to 6. Think of it like a more refined version of our old show, "The Prosthetic Moon of the Elephantine Illuminati," but with a question of the week. And on the other side of the day. No more 3 AM radio shows for me no more!

All of this means I have to make an even greater concentrated effort to peruse archive.org, last.fm, the WOBC archives, and the Conservatory library. Digging deep into layers of technical death metal (tech death) and technical grindcore (tech grind) is proving particularly difficult. While there are some promising leads (Triumph of Gnomes, Viraemia), there are also a bajillion lame, lame deathcore (the bastard child of death metal and hardcore) bands. I recommend The Apparatus's recent compilation of free, underground tech metal. It's a good soundtrack for problem sets...

Of course perusing music means I hear more vomit I want to emulate, which means I've been playing/making more music. I'll upload up some of the stuff I've been working on soonish. Tentative titles include "Black Juice" and "Sleazy Slam."

Socialists!

I just got back from the first meeting of Socialist Alternative. Brendan and Amanda also showed up, so it was a gleeful time all around. I took from it the fact that economic downturns occur because of overproduction. I should've been able to figure this out before, but I'd never really thought of it this way. The guest speaker, who'd spent a few years establishing a socialist platform in Bolivia, claimed that it would take $40 billion annually to provide food, shelter, education, and health services to the entire world. "Wow," I thought, "that doesn't seem right."

I just checked out the 2010 US budget and we're allocating $45.685 billion for education alone. So... either I misheard, the speaker was wrong, or the US is vastly mismanaging its tax revenue. I'll put my money on one and three. (FYI... ever wanted to see what the US budget looks like without staring at a huge list with lots of numbers? Look at this!!! Pretty graphics!)

Of course, the driving thrust of the speech was the utter failure of capitalism. Is it fair to look at the current recession like this? I took an introductory economics course here at Oberlin two years ago, and while I learned loads and gained a thorough understanding of how the current US and world economic systems function, I was left with the impression that economists don't actually know what's going on in a capitalist system. The chock everything up to the "invisible hand" and have no idea what's happening when 2000 lb. October 2008 anvils fall on their heads. Maybe socialists don't know any more than capitalists do, but I'm looking forward to seeing how their competing theories play out. Not that any political party besides Democrats and Republicans will ever come into existence in the US or anything.

On Le Corbusier: Part 1

I'm in this fabulous art history class called "Modernism and Environmentalism in 20th Century Architecture, with Prof. Daniel Barber. It's fun! I'm in it mostly for the chance that I'll persue architecture and/or urban planning. Taking it with me is my fellow vagrant Amanda. We seem to have competing views on Le Corbusier. More specifically, his idealized city of 3 million people laid out in "The Contemporary City," chapter 11 of The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (1929).

Amanda (and I paraphrase): Yuck! Straight lines? Grids? Exactly 24 skyscrapers? ALL THE SAME HEIGHT? Barf out! Gag me with a spoon! I'd rather kill myself than live in that city! It's completely unnatural!

Josh (Lankoff): I don't think the plan was to adhere to that EXACT model. He says that he's "avoid[ing] all special cases... assum[ing] an ideal site to begin with" (164). It's not that a construction crew is going to march in and build the exact same plan in every continent. This is just a jumping off point. There's obviously going to be variance. Also, what's wrong with grids? Have you ever tried driving in Boston or DC?

Amanda insisted that it'd never work anyway, so I've decided to apply the least rigorous, least scientific test to Le Corbusier's idealized city that I can: building it in Sim City 4 and seeing what happens.

Here's what we're dealing with:

This is pages 174-75. I've colored it pink to get around copyright laws. If I'm still in violation, contact me and I'll take this picture down.

The jist: Transportation hub in the center. It's surrounded by commercial skyscrapers. These are surrounded by medium-density housing which commutes to work primarily through train, monorail, subway, and other public transportation. This is all surrounded by the "park lands," public parks and forests. The plan goes into far more detail, which I will try to incorporate into my Sim City model as much as possible.

An important question: Sim City obviously isn't the perfect tool to do this, but does it hold ANY legitimacy? I'd like to think so. Its traffic simulations, at least, are highly realistic, especially using user-created plugins that more accurately simulate citizens' route planning to and from their jobs. Here is an article about a middle school in Rhode Island that used Sim City as part of its fifth and sixth grade curriculum.

Regular updates on the model Le Corbusier city to come.

Raccoon Flying in my Face

Yesterday I was on a dandy early mornin' run with my friend Rose, and we approached a rotting raccoon carcass. "Gross out!" I said, "Gag me with a spoon! A rotting raccoon carcass swarming with maggots!"

The nice drivers swerved left to avoid the dead animal and two runners. But then, a jackass in a truck was either drunk or just a huge jackass. "THUMP!" went the carcass as it got run over. A huge truck hurtling toward us, Rose and I leapt off the side of the rode, across a stream, and onto a hill as we were showered with fur, bacteria, carcass bits, and vile stench.

What are the chances that I caught some raccoon disease?

Shizberry

Allie and Jenny, two mischievous Oberlinians whom I miss kind of, started writing a musical with me last April. Cuz that's what we do on weekends.

It was originally supposed to be about the joys and perils of shizberry addiction. Shizberries are a highly addictive, highly electrically-charged maroon and navy fruit. They're not real. But as time progressed, Allie and Jenny turned their focus to a makeshift plotline about the "Bad Decision Café," a place we've all been known to frequent.

This left me with the incomplete overture to our shizberry musical. This piece was going to be played before the shizberry factory burns down, killing thousands of workers, in the style of the Triangle Factory.

So here you have it, the musical number I composed in Reason 3.0 (under the monkier of Crab Coma as I do with most things), titled "Shizberry" because there's no other real suitable name. Enjoy?