1 - Simple
2 - Moderate
3 - Ordinary
4 - Superior
5 - Marvelous
6 - Genuine
7 - Paramount
8 - Exorbitant
9 - Catastrophic

(These names were used for difficulty ratings in the first several Japanese editions of DDR, as well as Dance Dance Revolution USA, the first arcade release explicitly intended for America. They then mostly vanished, but have apparently returned in the Challenge Mode of Dance Dance Revolution Universe for XBox 360, with the addition of “Apocalyptic” for the tenth difficulty level.)

I avoided this book for a while because I admire a lot of Nagel’s thinking and didn’t want to face down the segment I was pretty sure I disagreed with– the Nagel of “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” who believes that consciousness is made of magical pixie dust.

Nagel isn’t actually as unreasonable as I feared; in particular, he realizes that conceivability arguments are largely pointless unless one is an expert on the thing being conceived: it proves nothing, for example, that I can imagine my having a headache without my brain being in any particular ‘brain state’. I can also imagine a group’s per-capita income going up even while every single member of the group becomes poorer: I’m imagining it right now, with a little green arrow pointing upward labeled “average income”, and a bunch of stick figures with frowny faces standing around as cartoon coins jump out of their pockets. Does this prove that it’s not a contradiction in terms, merely a coincidence that it’s never happened?

Still, Nagel writes off a lot of possibilities kind of fast. He says that the ‘objective view’ can never be complete, because no matter how many ’steps back’ you take, the fact that you are holding your NEW even-more-objective view of the world in your mind is a fact about the world that your description of the world doesn’t take into account. (Why not? If a theory needs to explicitly enumerate every true fact about the world to be complete, then nobody can ever actually understand a container of yogurt, let alone the entire universe. And if it doesn’t, then any theory which purports to cover the existence of human minds at all could clearly subsume an incident of human-understanding-the-universe that had not yet occurred at the time the theory was formulated.)

He’s much more lucid on ethics (and morality, etc.), which takes up about half the book, but not much is there which can’t also be found in the denser The Possibility Of Altruism or the less abstract Equality And Partiality, both of which I recommend more highly. This was interesting, as Nagel always is, but I don’t think I got much from it beyond a few moments of fear that I might not actually be human since I don’t share the anti-materialist convictions that some philosophers consider to be the necessary result of introspection by any non-robot.

Praising a Helen Love album for consistency seems like praising a pack of M&Ms for the same thing, but despite the cookie-cutter feel of her songs, listening to ten of them in a row, let alone sixteen, has generally been hard.

Now it’s not. Great! But there’s the same repetition of key ‘exciting’ words and phrases, and the same accumulation of fetishized entities from pop culture: Joey Ramone and Debbie Harry, Wings (there’s a whole song called “Jet” about the Wings tune of the same name), the 1910 Fruitgum Company. The air of unreality this creates abruptly becomes sad when Helen starts hitting the “we’ll be in love forever and ever and get married and have kids because we’re in love” themes too hard, especially in “First Boyfriend”. Barbie as celebrity stalker; charming.

Maybe I should hear Mike Doughty’s constant use of the word ‘girl’ as unmarked standard pop-music behavior. Instead, I assume prereflectively that he’s actually singing about 20-year-olds, which is a little creepy. On thinking about it, okay, whatever, it’s fine. Titling a song “I Just Want The Girl In The Blue Dress To Keep On Dancing” crosses the line into self-parody, but we extend the prerogative of self-parody easily these days, and the equally-bad title “I Wrote A Song About Your Car” is Golden Delicious’s best track, if you don’t mind it sounding 70% like “How Many Cans?”.

Anyway. After Soul Coughing, it came as a shock that what was good about Doughty’s songwriting was compatible with the timidity and MOR-itude that he seemed to want. But I guess it is, and I now often underestimate him– the Spanish lyric of “Wednesday (No Se Apoye)” isn’t flimsy multiculturalism, as I first thought; it’s an MTA sign telling New Yorkers not to lean on the subway car door. But the seconds the stakes inch upward, as when a (sampled?) female voice does an embarrassing imitation of Doughty’s 90s-era vocal cadences in “More Bacon Than The Pan Can Handle”, I say to myself, there has to be a better way than this.