Kassin+2 Review

In 1928, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade penned an influential statement of purpose for the modernist movement in his country, a work that appeared under the unusual title “Manifesto Antropófago” (Cannibal Manifesto). His thesis was both radical and banal: Brazil’s greatest cultural aptitude lay in “cannibalization,” tearing juicy ideas from the still-warm flesh of other cultures and digesting them into the Brazilian body. It was this artistic concept that informed the Tropicalia movement forty years later – vanguard musicians like Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes, Tom Zé, Gilberto Gil, and Gal Costa drew from bossa nova, psychedelic rock, American R&B, avant-garde composition, the blues, and every other living, organic musical style to create a totally new, distinctively Brazilian sound. The theory of artistic cannibalism, then, has always been at the heart of modern Brazilian popular music.

The recent collaborative album by the Rio-based “+ 2” trio – a project consisting of Moreno Veloso, Domenico Lancelotti, and Alexandre Kassin – is the perfect embodiment of the “cannibalismo” ethos. In a unique format, each trio member has taken turns headlining their albums: we’ve already been treated to “Moreno + 2” and “Dominico + 2,” and this Kassin volume, entitled “Futurismo,” completes the triptych. (The album title is an homage to both cannibalismo and to tropicalismo, and it is clear from the first track that Kassin’s beautiful songwriting owes a debt to these earlier movements.)

There is much of this album that is identifiably Brazilian: Kassin and his collaborators freely mix gentle yet complex melodies, breezy bossa guitars, and much of the other musical sweetnesses that conjure beaches, swaying palms, and other stereotypes from the vast South American country. Yet this is not your mother’s idea of Brazilian music. Embedding into the recognizably cool and effortless milieu are cutting-edge programming and electronics, frantic indie rock grooves, and a whole panoply of cannibalized sounds. Paradoxically, perhaps it is this quality of synthesis that makes “Futurismo” such a quintessentially Brazilian album.

Take the song “Samba Machine,” for instance. Here, we have a punchy guitar groove and a plodding samba bass line accompanied by a retro drum machine and vocal harmonies sung through a vocoder. Half way through the song is a distorted blues guitar solo. It is a mish-mash of competing musical signs, from the traditional (samba and blues) to the contemporary (electronic flourishes). In “Namorados,” your ear is initially greeted with a Björk-like electronic soundscape, with synthesizer sweeps and blips and bleeps; but then a bossa nova guitar line enters along with Kassin’s relaxed, wet voice. On “Pra Lembrar,” an orchestral introduction reminiscent of The Beatles and Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys gives way to a lilting, highly chromatic melody with Rhodes piano punctuations and a sunny, tropical disposition. Every song on the record plays out in a similar fashion: stylistic surprises abound.

Behind all the experimentation and deliciously cannibalistic gestures, however, is a set of gemlike songs, all masterfully crafted. Ultimately, analytical categories aside, this is where Kassin’s “Futurismo” truly shines.

Virtual Symphony

This is a fantastic, completely 2009 idea: Tan Dun has composed a symphony and is inviting everybody to download music for their respective instruments, rehearse with a video of the Chinese composer conducting directly to you and your specific part, then record (video or audio) yourself playing it. All submissions will be assembled into a virtual orchestra and will be played in Carnegie Hall this Spring; and the best auditions will be invited to NY to play the work in person under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas. This is music making for the web generation.

Nutrition- 10 Things You May Not Know

Between Biochemistry and Nutrition classes, I’ve learned an awful lot about digesting things this past fall. Eating things just isn’t the same when you can imagine it all breaking down inside your belly—the micelles of fat, the brush border of the small intestine taking up nutrients with passive sodium transport, and the fecal-bulking fiber in the colon. Mmmm!

Of course food is a huge topic in the USA. As a nation, we have gotten fatter. This growth is not just a concern in the USA. In fact, most countries that live in economic prosperity struggle with weight concerns. As I heard Madeline Albright say once, “There are 3 kinds of countries in the world: the countries where people are starving, the countries where people just barely have enough, and the countries where diet books are best-sellers.” It takes a great deal of effort for most people to maintain the same, healthy BMI throughout their lives when our culture encourages constant over consumption of calories. As my nutrition professor put it, “How many calories do you burn by walking/ running a mile? About 100. And how many calories can you fit in your mouth at one time? About 100.”

Diet and nutrition is something that has always been interesting to me, especially when I became vegan for 2 years in college. I was encouraged by my father to take vitamins as a teenager, and even more strongly persuaded when I became vegan. I wasn’t completely convinced, so I read a lot about various nutrients, vitamins and minerals. The information seemed confusing- some argued that certain combinations were harmful, or that preservatives and chemicals were causing many health problems.

After learning more about the topic of digestion and nutrition this semester, I’m not convinced that the truth is simpler than what I read before. First of all, most data and research regarding nutrition is recent. Additionally, many results are different for certain populations- such as BMI. What is considered “normal” BMI for Americans (18-24) is actually considered overweight in Asian countries. This is due to differences in body-type and percentage of body fat. Needless to say, ALL people are different, so it follows that there isn’t a “perfect” diet and lifestyle for everybody.

I don’t have any magical knowledge now that I’ve studied this topic, although I feel as though I could (and should) engage in more conversations with patients regarding their nutrition. I think most people understand how they should eat- whole grains, lean proteins, “good” fats, less processed foods and less restaurant meals. However, here’s a list of ten interesting facts you may not know about nutrition:

1. Americans on average eat very little fish, even though it is reported to be a great source of Omega-3 fatty acids. It’s recommended that we eat 2 servings a week, but Americans eat on average less than one “fish meal” per week. FYI, 2 servings of fish (5-6 oz.) does not put you at risk for mercury poisoning. Shrimp & shellfish don’t provide the same benefits as fish. Shrimp, in particular, in high in cholesterol.

2. Getting more of your calories from glucose (sugar) rather then other foods won’t make you fatter. In other words, calories count the same, no matter where they come from. So eat candy and corn syrup- but people do get more cavities- so brush like crazy if you do.

3. Certain vitamins, like B12, can stay in your body for years (25+ years) before they are depleated. This means that somebody could be vegan for a long time without any problems, and then suddenly develop problems years later. It follows that fat soluble vitamins (Vitamins A-K) do not need to be taken daily. Note that Vitamin D is the only “vitamin” that isn’t really a vitamin because the body can make it with sunlight exposure.

4. There is no evidence that taking multi-vitamin pills has any health benefit. The only vitamins that have proven health benefits are folic acid, daily calcium (especially for women), and in some cases vitamin D, iron, and B12. Many doctors still recommend daily vitamins because there aren’t any adverse effects from taking them. However, take them with food- otherwise you might as well not take them.

5. US breakfast cereals and other foods are typically fortified with many vitamins. A single serving of cereal can be very rich in vitamins, and watch out because some vitamins, such as A, can cause liver damage and other toxic effects.

6. This will seem contradictory, but fiber slows gastric emptying from the stomach, but increases speed of digestion in the intestine. That means, eat your salad first if you want to feel full faster, but eat your salad second if you want to stay more regular.

7. There are no diets (Atkins, South Beach, DASH, etc.) that show significant, long-term weight loss for large groups of people. Not a single one. Even gastric bypass surgery patients usually gain enough weight back over time to be overweight or obese again. Diet counseling combined with lifestyle changes has the best results, but there is no easy way to lose weight. Nevertheless, losing just 5-10% of body weight for somebody with a BMI above 24 greatly reduces the risks of heart disease and has many physical benefits.

8. Eating less calories for a significant period of time (more than 2 days) produces hormones that make you hungrier, and then make you store body-fat faster than before. People who have malnutrition as youth, are more likely to be obese.

9. As humans age, muscle turns to fat. A person’s metabolism and the amount of calories needed to survive depend entirely on fat-free body mass. Therefore, as we age, we can eat the exact same foods and get the same exercise, and still gain weight.

10. Our tastes (what we like, and don’t like) have correlation to what our mother’s ate when they were pregnant with us. If you don’t like something, and never have liked it, the chances are that your mom didn’t eat it when she was pregnant with you.

Music Review Podcasting

Go here to download a podcast of my recent review of the new Guns n' Roses album "Chinese Democracy." I'll be doing music reviewing in this format more in the future.

Music as Torture Update

What do Nine Inch Nails tunes and the Barney theme song have in common? In addition to Reznor's and the dinosaur's penchant for purple velvet, they both share the unfortunate commonality of torture.

As I chronicled in a series of posts from last April, the US military and intelligence services have been using music as a weapon of torture with imprisoned "foreign combatants" since the invasion of Iraq and the opening of Guantanamo. Today, however, it was reported that musicians whose music was used in these enhanced interrogations are organizing and fighting back (including angsty NIN frontman Trent Reznor, Massive Attack, former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, and a crew of children's song writers).

More on this development here.

Manze Dayila - Solé

Originally posted on Fábrika here.




Listening to the recent album by New York-based Haitian singer Manze Dayila made me think of the title to A Tribe Called Quest’s first record, “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm.” This title has always impressed upon me the organic and always moving nature of music, its ability to traverse seas and cross cultures. Indeed, the cultural travels and complexities that inform the history of any post-colonial music are profound. Picking up the exact same rhythmic motto in Cuban son, Dixieland jazz, samba, and West African drumming, for instance, gives one a glimpse into the journey of one people from Africa to the New World. These are the paths of rhythm.

There are numerous crosscurrents of musical influence apparent in Dayila’s music. On one hand, you have the Caribbean sources: her band, The Nago Nation, possesses a technical mastery over the gentle lilt of reggae (witness the opening cut, “Kwi”). There are even traces of calypso in some passages. Among “Caribbean sources” can be included, of course, many different varieties of native Haitian music that have developed on the western part of Hispaniola over the last few hundred years as a distinctive mixture of West African, French, Spanish, and Taino influences. In addition to her immediate roots, Dayila’s band dabbles in African forms both ancient and modern, from the elegant flourishes of the “kora” (a many-stringed harp) and the rhythmic patter of the “balafon” (an African variety of marimba) to highlife and other contemporary African genres, themselves the result of all sorts of fascinating cross-Atlantic musical borrowings. (The second track, “Miseye Rigaud,” exemplifies this well.) Toss into this mix a healthy dose of samba (“I Want to Be Free”) as well as the great-grandchildren of these earlier colonial styles, hip-hop and club electronica (“That Feeling” and “Simbi D’lo”), and you can begin to approximate Dayila’s sound. Of course, all the music on this record represents a coming together of different influences and musical cultures – nothing in here in purely one thing or another. Like the colonial history of Haiti itself (and the rest of the New World), this is an album where diverse sounds mingle freely.

Another notable feature of the album is Dayila’s earthy contralto voice. Like Sade, her instrument is as haunting as it is distinctive, often occupying that titillating sex-ambiguous register where a voice can be either a mannish woman or a womanish man. Her melodies are broad and expansive, even when the grooves underlying them are quick and jittery. Soaring above the lively activity of the band, Dayila’s voice is powerful and elemental in a way that is all too rare in today’s world of pop music. Moreover, the quality of her singing convinces you that the lyrical subjects of her songs are of equal weight (although she sings almost entirely in Haitian Creole).

Manze Dayila’s “Solé” is a superb record with a chimera’s soul. Listening to it is like standing in the middle of an intersection where all sorts of paths of rhythm are colliding in a steady rush.

Sign of the Times

A Series of Short Thanksgiving Reflections

Please feel free to add a little blurb that highlights something funny, inspiring, thought-provoking, sad, happy, or even mundane about everyone's favorite gut-distending holiday.

A Blood Thirsty Biochemical Explanation

During this summer, I was preparing myself for medical school by doing foolish things- I read a popular teen vampire novel called Twilight. This week Twilight the movie premiered, although I haven’t had time to go see it yet. However, it was during this same week at one of my final biochemistry lectures that I learned something very interesting and unexpected… vampires are real!

What?! Why didn't I hear about this disease before? Oh yes, that’s probably because people who actually have this genetic disease would rather not be related to vampires. Given that vampires are considered evil by many people and were tortured outcasts of society, this is a touchy subject. The legend of vampires exists nevertheless, and there is a real medical explanation for how it may have originated. Therefore, I feel compelled to share this intriguing knowledge.

It makes sense that before science was able to explain strange genetic diseases and symptoms, people assumed that they were connected with the devil or a result of certain behaviors or diet. In fact, when I lived in rural Ukraine, pregnant women refused to cut their hair, thinking it would cause birth defects. Yet, now we know that genetic defects are often the result of a tiny, unlikely mistake in the duplication & division of DNA. A single tiny rearrangement or deletion can cause a lot of strange things to happen- it’s amazing that most of us come out looking “normal.”

The possible explanation of the vampire legend is one of seven types of porphyrias, which are all diseases in the synthesis of heme (the compound in blood which carries oxygen and carbon dioxide to keep us alive). Heme is synthesized in the liver and bone marrow. There are eight steps, four of which take place inside mitchondria and four in the cytoplasm. Therefore, there are multiple opportunities for defective enzymes and build up of intermediate products.

The interesting thing about the intermediates in heme synthesis is that they contain many benzene rings. When these rings are oxidized, they can absorb light and appear to be colored (think of purple-yellow-brown-greenish bruising when heme is broken down right under the skin). When there is a build up of intermediates, it causes purple urine, red and fluorescent teeth, and extreme sensitivity to light rays.

The type of porphyria believed to have started the legend of vampires is called porphyria cutanea tarda. It leads to a build up of products which cause a variety of problems. First, people suffer from extreme anemia, so they are very pale. Additionally they have red and fluorescent teeth, which can look pretty strange. The intermediate products in their blood can oxidize to become insoluble when exposed to sunlight. This causes pain and blistering in their skin, so they would try to never go outside in sunlight. Also, drinking fresh blood, which somebody may have figured out, could relieve the neurological symptoms. This was a genetic defect, so it stayed within families. Since these people were probably outcasts from society, they may have married cousins causing the disease to proliferate faster.

None of this is proven fact because nobody knows where any supposed “vampires” are buried. Otherwise, it would be possible to dig them up and perform a genetic test. Also, this explanation doesn’t explain a fear of garlic or why you have to put a stake through their hearts to kill them. This is an extremely rare disease. Yet, it’s interesting to know that we understand so much about the body now that we can go back in time to solve medical mysteries.

Random observations

One of the best parts of higher education is having someone explain something to you in such a way that you exhale the quintessential "OH!" One such moment was a computer science instructor who stated the now obvious "Random generation is a human construct." It is tempting to observe the chaotic structure of the universe as random, but such an observation would be incorrect. The universe, just as all things in it, is bound by what we understand as physical laws. Under specific conditions all objects operate specifically according to their composition. Our ability to perceive the complex structure of the universe may be limited, but a larger perspective will reveal that all things within the universe follow a specific order. In that sense I believe, to a certain degree, in pre-destiny. The universe is massive, but if you trace any event you will find that it was always meant to occur as it occurred, based on the fact that said event is the effect of an infinite number of causes, all causes of which are in themselves diverse effects.

Anyway, randomness does not exist in a physical model, but only as a conceptual model that we have invented. Even so there are certain logical flaws to randomness we need to observe. Ideally we initialize the concept of randomness to imply chaos or surprise. The best model to demonstrate randomness that we use is the coin toss. Heads or tails seems random enough, and statistical analysis shows that the results hold very close to 50-50. Such analysis is ignorant to all conditions present however. Elevation in relation to air pressure, speed of rotation based on the kinetic energy of the flick, the shape of the thumb and the finger upon which the coin rests, the coin's initial resting state in reference to heads or tails facing upward, the atmospheric conditions, the temperature of the air, etc. If humans were capable of ascertaining all conditions possible we would then create perfect predictions to the outcome of a coin-toss. As such, our fallibility is perfect in allowing us a fair and perfect method for deciding the initial state of a football game. Music is another idiom where I encounter randomness and often so. In the course of electronic composition we use random number generation regularly. It is a very effective tool to avoid the predictability that years of tonal composition have afforded us. Still, even the most elaborate algorithm of randomness is never really random. The other day I was playing my iPod through my stereo. I created a playlist that, as I was using the limited technology of the iPod's "On-the-Go" listing, was not linked in a way any DJ would be proud of. There was no consideration of feel, tempo, key, or splice points, only a list of songs I enjoyed. Instead of put forth the effort to make cognitive and meaningful transitions to songs, I instead employed the "shuffle" feature. As evidenced by my prior statement I am obviously lazy, and as such decided to leave "shuffle" on when listening to Hot Chip's "The Warning" album. Expecting a random distribution of songs from the album order, what gave me the greatest apprehension was that the random distribution played the songs in order of 1, 2, 3, 5, and then selected from the end of the album. The anticipation of unknown segues and an altered energy flow was further disturbing when my usual sense of order was inserted into a chaotic environment. In that sense, with the anticipation of chaos, the most chaotic occurrence was order.

It reminded me of a cartoon I watched as a kid. It was a Sesame Street video I had that was telling stories of all the characters. Oscar the Grouch was talking about how cold it was outside and said "This hot chocolate is going to taste good and yucky." Oscar is a character that has a fine appreciation for negative things. Hot chocolate is a foodstuff that the majority of its consumers find to be quite enjoyable. The fact that hot chocolate is an enjoyable beverage is something that a person with a negative disposition would find disgusting, but as such is counter-intuitive to the fact that a negative person thrives off of negative experiences. Any "yuckiness" present is a sought-after experience, and as such would be considered good. This began an inner-manifestation of a dialogue about good and evil, and how the supposed polar opposites are completely meaningless. In a sense randomness is the same way. The creation of chaos is internal, in which case the superimposition of order upon your given state is the ultimate in chaos. Or so my perceptions have led me to believe.