okay, so while i am über jealous about the transformers shooting currently taking place in p-town (in your face penn!), i am stoked to see coldplay perform this friday morning at the today show. while the new album (viva la vida) is not revolutionary, the thematic motifs are poignant and honest. the songs are self-reflexive and characterized by strange ruminative gestures (e.g. the song “lost” appears in two forms: “lost!” and “lost?”). i think this is done for some sort of temporal-existenstial effect. does anything really progress through time? how does self-identity exist and change in time? the title track moves the listener to questions like these, with the song’s speaker recounting his rise and hard fall from power–maybe an ecclesiastes-esque take on the “merits” of human political clout?
in other news, yay for astrocytes! now we can begin to unpack the linkages between local neural activity and the hemodynamic BOLD response in fMRI.
