An Army of Tori Amoses

I must confess that my favorite genre of music is that of the single female singer&songwriter. And so it goes that some of my favorite artists are Tori Amos and Ani Difranco, both of whom, you may notice, are American. Don't ever say that America is a cultural vacuum because virtually all of today's modern music comes from this big shaggy dog of a nation. Such talent does not rise up in a vacuum. For every Tori Amos found by the recording industry of America (who are flailing about in their last throes of death by suing their customers), there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of could-have-beens.

So where are these could-have-beens and should-have-beens? As the mainstream music publishing houses implode, just below the radar, a massive parallel universe of independent musicians has emerged. These guys don't sell their souls for the possibility of being a star. They control their own music, happy to make a little money, and play at small venues. Of course, until just a few years ago, the dream of selling your music yourself would have been a quick route to destitution, unless you are Ani Difranco. There's just so many fans you can reach without the helping hand of a large music company, with all the compromises that entails.

But as the technology juggernaut has barrelled forward, music distribution has changed irrevocably. Of the things I have stumbled onto, the most mind-boggling has been the web-site www.cdbaby.com. These guys sell the works of some 64,000 artists from around the world, though most are from the united states. On their site, you can download a sample of the music of all the artists, trying before buying. But most importantly, cdbaby makes sure the artists gets $6 - $12 of the price of the cd, and that the artists gets paid weekly. A successfull artist selling their cd's on this site will be able to eat.

I've been browsing this site since I discovered it about a few weeks ago. It's been a joyful experience where the only link between you and the artist is the music - no hype, no advertising, no pornography inducing you to buy. What you buy is what you hear.

The sublime irony with this new system is that to navigate your way through the world of 64,000 indepedent-minded artists who have bucked from the mainstream, one is utterly required to categorise these artists in the most meticulous way possible. It is just not physically possible to listen to everything. So to make the browsing process possible, one must narrow down the search to one's favorite genres. And even after I've narrowed down to a list of artists in the same genre, I find that I sample only those cd's where I like the cover and the blurb written about each artist.

In the end, I found myself skimming the blurbs, looking for key-words. Whilst the quality of the writing fluctuates from blurb to blurb, in the end, most of the blurbs ends up making comparisons "...if you like Tori Amos and Ani Difranco...", "she has the sweetness of early Metallica, with the banshee soulfness of Michael Bolton", "...if David Bowie was an androdgynous alien from outer space, implanted with the left lobe of Brian Eno's brain, you might get something like...".

In the end, one cannot escapes one's taste and I found myself scouring the solo female artists in folk, pop looking for artists, inspired by, sounds like, similar to, influenced by but sounds completely different from ... Tori Amos. And boy, did I find them, hundreds of them. So now I know where the army of proto-Tori Amoses can be found if I ever need to unleash a strike force of quirky emotional banshees of song and piano onto the world.

The Educated Ethnic Mosaic

So the PC police gave us a new name to describe the mixed ethnicities around us: the ethnic mosaic. Formerly known as the melting pot, the old term conjured up horrible pictures of cultural assimilation, which pained the more sensitive in our caring community. And so in came the term Ethnic Mosaic, which brings in National Geographic images of happy diverse communities, living together, somehow stronger and richer in harmony. And nowhere is it more Mosaic in the United States than right here in San Francisco.

So I look around and apart from the invisible whites, I see asians, a flood of hispanics, and a handful of blacks. Of course this varies greatly depending where I am, from the predominantly hispanic quarter of the Mission to the Asian enclave of Chinatown. But for the overall picture, it's best to turn to the US census,

"Of the 2000 population,
- an estimated 217 mil (77.1%) were White,
- 36.4 mil (12.9%) were Black or African American;
- Asians and Pacific Islanders numbered 12.7 mil (4.5%);
- and the American Indian and Alaska Native population was about 4 mil (1.5%);
- 35.3 mil (13%) were of Hispanic origin.
The Latino or Hispanic population rose nearly 13 million (or 57.9%) between the 1990 and 2000 censuses. In 2000 one half of Hispanics lived in California and Texas."

Now America has been lauded as the land of spectacular opportunity where you can suceed by pulling up your bootstraps. Now, I am working at a cushy research institute, though not the highest pinnacle of success in the United States, it's still an achievement of sorts [insert rant about the utility of a phd]. The ethnic mix at this place makes a good litmus test precisely because science is supposedly blind of all human weaknesses, and can only be seduced by The Truth.

The first thing I notice is there is nary an african-american or hispanic around, although there are spanish speakers around, who come mainly from Spain. But as I look a bit closer, I realise the security guards are mainly black, and the cleaners are hispanic. As I looked even closer, I also realised I'd made a mistake lumping postdocs and grad students. Most of the grad students fall under the white category, well-bred, healthy shiny good-time American kids, with a a surprisingly high number of asian-americans. But once you pass the barrier into the post-doc territory, there are very very few native americans. Here at my institutions, there are a lot of Europeans, Italians, Eastern Europeans seem to dominate, but I hear there are a lot more Asians across the Bay. So this begs the question, where did all the American grad students go?

I don't really know what to conclude from this. As race has been proven to be *not* a genetic property, such disparities must be social. So social as to be all but invisible.

We're Number Two

So I am working at a top US research university. How do I know? Because everyone around me says so. Not long after I arrive, I overhear this conversation.

"We're number two."

"I'm not sure about that."

"Well definitely in the top five"

"I can accept that but top two, no. Yes top five."

Well, I am glad to be at a top five place. But then I think a bit and realise that I don't know exactly what this place is the top of. Research institutes? Universities? Medical universities? I had this image of researchers swarming around the campus, like some kind of bee-surveyer, zapping random students with an instrument to measure top research potential. Perhaps they base the ranking on how many students they zap, with double the points if they zap faculty memebers.

So I think further on what might be the criteria. Is it based on research, or numbers of publications, amount of grants? Or perhaps one can measure that intangible of intangibles - prestige. After all, the conversation that spawned this conversation was entirely based on self-perception. Now I have to say at this point that I am working at a medical university even though I am doing basic science. Where, you might ask, does one put a basic research laboratory at a medical university? Easy, in Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Nevertheless, I suspect that they were talking about medical university.

But then I think to myself, perhaps the first guy was right, and we really are number two. But if we are number two, then who's number one? This question I have not yet ascertained exactly. But I have a sneaky suspicion it's John Hopkins University in Baltimore. If that's the case, then it's okay with me because I've been to Baltimore and I do not ever ever want to live in Baltimore.

Nevertheless, this obsession with rank is very important in the United States. There is a higher density of university in the United States than anywhere else in the world. There are some 2000 institutes of higher education. And given the exorbiant cost of sending your son or daughter to some of these places, you want to know that you're getting your monies worth. Hence the existence of publications like the annual issue of US News, College Guide, where all these institutes are given a concrete irreducible number. And in such a supermarket, brand recognition is everything.

The American Lexicon

Some new words I have learnt in America:

ghetto : when something is cheap and nasty. I wonder if my colleague who uses this word has actually lived in a ghetto? Has the black-white divide in this country become so transparent that a word - used formerly to describe jewish enclaves but used for for predominantly african-american and hispanic enclaves of very poor people - has become a universally identified with a degraded state of existence?

mad prop : something that works, something that is good. I cannot fathom where this word came from.

getting digits : a verb describing the act of trying to obtain a telephone number from somebody.

Straight Guy Dancing in a Gay Bar

San Francisco, gay capital of the world, where a man having an intimate conversation with a man in a bar can mean a lot more than a shared interest in the same baseball team. So the other night, I trooped off with a posse of my new friends from work. In particular there is my friend A, a sophisticated 23 year old male from West Virgina who somehow managed to develop a Euro-trash accent after spending a year abroad in Germany. A was recently been seduced by F, a feisty 29 year old Italian woman, no doubt falling irresistibly to that faux-european accent of the younger A. They were, as they say, an item.

Anyway, we arrive at this nightclub, confusingly called Cafe, which is smack in the middle of the Castro. Cafe is your typical gay bar/pick-up joint/dance club. And we had gone there to meet with some other friends, who, it so happened, were gay. We mingle and dance to the music - ranging from obligatory 80's kitch to some heavier trance beats. It's an intensely packed place in the middle of the dance floor, hot flushed bodies writhing to the beat, and this being a gay bar, any young male may, and probably will, be propositioned. And not even male. When we arrived and found our friends, one of them, a tiny indian girl was doing this dance with two tiny gay men (I presume), which I shall describe compactly as a Double Gyrating Sandwich.

My friend A, is an experience junky, or so he says, and at some point in the night, a striking gay asian man, G, with cutting cheekbones and washed blonde streaks slither from out of the crowd and sidles up to A. A enjoys the attention and excited by the homo-erotic charge starts to dance intimately mano-o-mano with G.

Meanwhile, F is dancing just adjacent pretending that this is not happening.

As hand reaches over hand, caress over caress, movements whirl into an intricate foreplay movement. The motions intensify until A has bent over backwards on the ground, knees bent, back of the head touching the ground, and G is lying prostrate over A in some kind of grinding motion.

At this point, F leaves the dance floor.

They dance some more, and when the novelty of watching A dance with G wears off, I wander off in search of F. She has moved to the opposite side of the dance-floor, dancing with our other friends.

By and by, A returns, wearing a stupid grin on his face and finding F, who does not. F does not look happy, a look of intense approbration marring her normally joyous face. For the next 20 minutes, A turns on the charm, melting the approbation right off her face. In the end all is well, but I could see the barest whisps of doubt behind those feisty Italian eyes.

Drugs drugs drugs

So I've been reading Katherine Greider's book, "The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off Its Customers", or to be specific - ripping off American Consumers. This book fills an enormous gaping hole in the literature - a compact, well-written expose of the extortionist known as the pharmaceutical industry. What better way to blackmail the consumer with the threat of death? I can't think of a better way to boost the bottom-line of my profit margin.

Lest you believe the industry's self-justifications that the cost of $10,000 for a single dose of drugs for dying AIDS victims, are simply to recoup costly R&D, Greider dissects these claims and puts it into a well-focused perspective. After all, the pharmaceutical industry is the world's *most* profitable industry, outstripping even weapons manufacturing. And most of the cost of a drug is spent on marketing. Selling directly to the consumer is but the tip of the iceberg. There are almost 100,000 salesreps out there, making good money by bribing doctors, and manipulating them into prescribing the most costly drugs instead of cheaper alternatives.

This was driven home to me the other day. It was the first time I went to my Primary Care Physician, the doctor assigned to me by my work's health insurance plan. Walking into the office, I noticed an air-hostess, or at least, I thought she was - tall, beautiful, well-groomed in a business suit, hair tied in a bun, and pulling a luggage suitcase on wheels behind her. As I was in there to make an appointment, I was quickly out of there. As I entered the elevator, the air hostess lugged her suitcase in after her. As the door closes and the elevator goes down, I look down into her suitcase, and realise that she was not an air-hostess. it wasn't a suitcase, but a shopping cart full of drugs.

Fresh tatoo

My room-mate came back with a new tattoo yesterday. It was a cover-up job - a more professional, better designed pattern - to cover the folly of a drunken kitchen hack-job. The tattoo was this intricate mechanical/organic heart organ design over the left upper part of the arm. When I first saw it, it was covered with a piece of cloth and plastic. Pus was seeming from under the plastic and a ring of blood was starting to form.

Tatooed Love

I am sitting in a bus, watching a young couple. Clean cut, well-raised, most probably operating on a high level of personal hygiene. She, with bobbed blond hair and a goofy smile. He, strong-jawed, short hair, in pastel toned clothing. The perfect middle class couple. Except for a matching pair of tattoos on the wrist of the right hand. The tattoo was essentially a word, something like "PRISNTJ". I'm guessing it might have been something in a Nordic language.