Adventures in cross-platform living

So I recently switched my main desktop machine from Mac to PC. It was a gradual process; my old iBook became the wife's computer, and my dual-proc MDD G4 became a dedicated audio box for my new studio. I had built a little beater PC for running Access and some other cro-mag PC-only software, as well as for checking web pages in IE (as they don't behave the way you think they're gonna, sometimes). When I say beater, I mean PIII, 10GB HDD, old Voodoo 3dfx card beater.

One morning as I enjoyed my coffee and bagel I spied the Fry's ad in the paper, and what did I see but a P4 / Mobo combo for US$99.00! Sold, I thought. Time to upgrade and take advantage of Google Earth and maybe get some games, etc. (Note to the faithful: I have almost always been able to find good games for the Mac, starting back with Marathon. the G4 currently has Halo and Rainbow Six 3 on it.) You know how this ends. The processor and mobo swap led to an NVidia card and a 200GB HDD (courtesy of Outpost.com, which Fry's owns) which led to, initially, a SUSE 9.3 Pro load - previous post below - but when the time came to put XP on, it didn't like being on the G drive, so there that went. I will reload at some point, because I really like some things about that OS.

I'll say this about SUSE: it found every single piece of hardware on this box. I was good to go as soon as the install finished. XP was quite a different story. I had to load the D-Link drivers manually and then hunt down some of the drivers for the stuff on the board. Like the sound card, for the love a Mike! Anyway, I'm rambling now...

Making beats the lazy way

Sometimes, like right now, I like to lay back on the sofa and make beats in Reason on the iBook and FTP them up to Jetpack so when I get back to the lab I can pull them into Pro Tools and add some keys or other found sounds. Broadband and cheap software have led to genuine distributed composition - different elements of a track can be easily created on different platforms in different locations at different times. For me, it helps beat back the sameness that can creep into making electronic music. Change your scenery, change your tools, change your output.

When I can rock beats on my phone and then email them to myself, we'll really be onto something. So word to Verizon - I don't want ESPN on my celly. I want a drum machine.

And in other news...

Sean Puffy Puff Daddy P. Diddy Combs would like to retract his previous statement that he is, going forward, simply to be known as "Diddy."

He meant to say thay from now on, in perpetuity, he is to be addressed as "Buttmunch," or "B. Munchy" to his close associates.

You can go home again...

Got word today that the band is moving back to it's old rehearsal studio at Precinct Sound, in the scenic Ponce-Highlands section of Atlanta. The Precinct is housed in the old APB Homicide Unit HQ, so it's got a certain vibe to it. I'm going to relocate Flatbed Labs down there also, to get all my gear together in one place and continue the musical rebirth. w00t! Speaking of, I posted a new track over at Jetpack Studios called Saturn Pants (I think I talked about it below).

Nobody cares about any of this but me.

Two new signs that the end is a-comin'

Apparently, gas is now worth killing people for. In America!

Also, Pat Robertson has proved his wikkidness once again by calling for the assasination of Hugo Chavez. I guess praying for the death of a Supreme Court Justice wasn't enough.

Please, Dear Lord, prove to us your infinite wisdom. Smite Pat Robertson. Smite him real good.

First post from a spankin' new system

Today was my first day off after Folk Fest, which was about 50 work hours of heavy lifting, stifling heat, fast food, traffic, and general ass-busting. I should have laid around and watched movies, but instead I got all inspired and built a new P4 box and loaded SUSE 9.3 Linux. It took me a couple of hours, but I just got the wireless card happening, got connected to my Airport base station, and here we are. If you feel like playing with Linux, go get you some SUSE.. I downloaded the whole thing free as five ISOs, burned the disks on my Mac, and loaded it up. Like a champ, except for the ^%#@^%# network config!

RIP Dr. Robert Moog

The man that changed the face of modern music has left us. All I can say is thanks for the miracles.

The Moog Music Web site

G. Gordon Loopy

G. Gordon Liddy, in a pitiful attempt to smear Cindy Sheehan, has decided that the widely-used term neocon is some kind of anti-semetic code word. (Not like the uncoded anti-semetic words his old boss liked to use.)

-----begin paste---------

From the August 17 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes:

LIDDY: Well, I think that it's true that there are Americans who feel the way Cindy Sheehan does. Unfortunately, they are Americans who are very anti-Israel and, in some ways, anti-Semitic. She uses the term how the "neocons" are doing this thing -- that's code word for "the Jews in the Pentagon." She has made statements such as --

ALAN COLMES (co-host): Are you calling her anti-Semitic?

LIDDY: Yes. If she gets Israel out of Palestine, then we can get out of Iraq. I mean, check out her statements, she's way out there.

COLMES: Cindy Sheehan's anti-Semitic?

LIDDY: Yes.

COLMES: That's outrageous.

SEAN HANNITY (co-host): It's outrageous what has been said.

ELEANOR CLIFT (Newsweek contributing editor): That is almost not worth responding to.

LIDDY: Look at her statements. Look at her statements and judge for yourself.

CLIFT: Look at your statements.

-------end paste--------------

(Transcript from Media Matters for America)

Why, oh why, does anyone give airtime to this felonius buffoon? Is it just when Ann Coulter is having her horns polished? I think Liddy, Coulter, Limbaugh and their pals need to volunteer their time and talents in Iraq, driving around in a minivan looking for IEDs. Maybe they'll find some.

I will hit you with a chair for an obsolete iBook

Apparently, the lure of Apple gear is so powerful that people will act like crazed beasts to get their hands on...

A four-year-old iBook?

I'm typing this on a 600mhz iBook G3 that I've had for about four years (maybe only three), and I have to say that while it still gets the job done, It's not worth peeing one's self or driving through a crowd in one's car to get holt to.

CNN has the full story.

Saturn Pants

That's the working title of a track I got pretty far along today. It's one of those "I sure am glad I'll never have to play this thing live" bits, because all the keyboard parts are weird detuned oscillator patches on the Moog, and they're not remotely in tune with each other. They're funky in a disonant, honking-geese sort of way. I know it's going to be a good song because it makes me laugh.

Electronic music revisited

I did some work over at the Jetpack Studios site today - cleaned up the layout, posted some older music. The tracks are stuff I like that I never released for some reason. Anyway, they's up. They're free. Go get them.

It's all part of my master plan to get some more music done this fall. I figure, if I have a site where I'm supposed to be putting music, then I better be finishing some of the hundreds of orphaned beats and noise beds and whatever else is festering in the cavernous hard drives of the ol' G4. Also, an artist whom I respect quite a bit wants to do some cover art for me, so I guess I need enough stuff to warrant a cover, or whatever the online equivalent of one is, since I'll probably only release online, unless Gina suffers from a lapse in judgement...

Ice Ice Baby

We had an opening at my gallery (well, it's not my gallery, but I work there) and one of the main exhibitions was Corinna Mensoff's Exodus Populace, a beautiful meditation on family history and the immigrant experience involving cast iron elements, recycled metal constructions and multimedia.

Her manly half, Shan Sutherland, anchored the opposite end of the space with a surprisingly poetic installation comprised of a set of huge cast iron tongs suspended from the ceiling and an iron chair-like apparatus, both of which supported 150 lb. blocks of ice which melted into a large metal pan. The crafted permanence of the iron elements contrasted with the constantly changing ice, which took on new shapes and internal detailing as it melted. It was the kind of thing you had to be in the presence of to really get it, but I took a few camera phone snaps:

The completed, untitled installation.

At the end of the evening, just before the decision was made to take the ice down.

I wish I had some picture's Corinna's install, but it was an entire room, and really the kind of immersive experience that photos don't serve well.

Why I dig my job

I'm waiting for a 150 lb. block of ice to arrive, which will then be suspended from the ceiling via giant iron tongs.

I work here.

Oscar Peterson

There are certain pieces of music that - I am convinced of this - actually alter your body chemistry. You listen, your skin tingles, your eyes tear up, your hair stands up a little bit, and you are flooded with the absolute knowledge that space and time are illusory, that all existence is merely the manifestation of God's Inifinite Goodness, and that your own physical container is an antenna desinged to beam this knowledge out into the Oness of Humankind. Oscar Perterson's "Gravy Waltz" is one such piece of music.

I hit the studio early this morning to get some design revisions done, and I've got an iTunes shuffle going, and then it happens. Oscar cranks up and everything else just falls away. I have to take off my glasses, put my head in my hands, and just let it happen. Something about 3/4 swinging that hard just knocks my socks off.

Makes me feel all funny inside, like climbing the rope in gym class.

So if your day is all suckage, if you're wondering what it's all about, why we're here, what the point of all this suffering is - just go get some Oscar. An easy fix is The Essential Oscar Peterson, on Verve Records. You'll be glad you did.

The PTA took my baby away...

I just got back from registering my kid for school - 5th grade - and man, do those PTA leeches take a bite! I mean, I'm all about some PTA, and the fee per kid is only $4.00, but it's just like a phone bill. By the time all the extras and suggested donations and supply kits and agendas (I didn't ever have no agendas when I was a muffin, just a raggedy-assed notebook with Van Halen logos drawn all over it) and bullet-proof book covers and covers for the book covers and - you see what I mean.
$3,478 later, we are proud PTA parents once again.

As I was finishing up the mini-mountain of paperwork, including writing the same emergency contact info on 14 different cards and forms, the new science teacher reached behind his seat and pulled out a brochure and a business card, covered it with his hand, and said, "This is not related in any way. Just though you folks might be interested." Is this clown shilling Amway? I though as I took the brochure, or some kind of Intelligent Design foolishness?

Imagine my relief when I looked down at a brochure for a summer international village program, some kind of pinko-lefty one-world feelgoody kind of UNICEF claptrap. Thank God, he's just a hippie. I can deal with that.

Welcome home, Discovery

As I listen to NASA audio of the shuttle landing, I can't help but think that manned space flight is one of the most important things that we as a species could possibly be doing. From a technological standpoint, and in taking a long view of our potential future, we owe it to our children's children to be working on better ways to get off this rock and come back safely. From a philosphical standpoint, we are seekers. For better or worse, we want to move and to find and to learn. Our ultimate origins are out there, in the furnaces of stars. We need to continue with our baby steps, expanding our boundaries bit by bit.

Electronic music is making me sad

Lately, the act of working on electronic compositions is wearing me out. I may as well be working in Excel, or making a PowerPoint. No joy. I used to crank out nebulous, cantankerous tracks that nobody ever really liked but me, and then I had a little garageband.com adventure where I consciously did a couple of groove-heavy tracks, with actual bass lines and everything, and got some good feedback.

It ruined everything. Every new track I started, I tried to duplicate that feel, those grooves. Was I really that much of an approval hog? What happened to the old 7/4 rhythms, the lack of discernible melodies, the barrage of heavily treated samples taken from my answering machine? I dug that stuff. I got to work out my inner John Cage, rip shamelessly from Aphex Twin, and have a grand ol' time. After all, I'm in a band that makes really accessible music, so I should feel free to make gawdawful racket in my free time, yes?

I've been working on two tunes for the last month or so - lots of painstaking drum edits, tasty bass lines, and spooky Moog parts. I hate them both. It's time to break it all back down to the basics. Noise and more noise. Maybe a beat, about 4 minutes in...

sometimes I feel like a rock star

The band did a show at Eddie's Attic this weekend, and as usual, the enigmatic Shalom Aberle mixed the hell outta that thing! We'll be posting some live recordings soon. Shalom has worked with some greats (and his ears are crafted of solid gold), and Eddie's is the room that launched Shawn Mullins and, more notably, John Mayer out into the world, so it always feels like a privilege to play there. It's such an inviting, comfortable space, the crowd is rooting for you, the staff is amazing (I've never had a waitress try to return a tip as being too generous anywhere else!), the food is good, &c. &c.

It is raining like crazy again this morning - we took the dogs out early and came home soaked. When I first moved to tha ATL in 1986, the city was a tinderbox. We were in an extended drought, it was hotter than all Hades, and I remember a spate of cars bursting into flames in parking lots. It was like Mad Max with shopping malls. We (my then roomies and myself - we were an electronica band living in a rented condo crammed full of music equipment) came home one night to see two cars burning in the grocery store parking lot across the street. A few nights later, an off-duty cop interupted a restaurant robbery and was shot to death. We had police helicopters hovering over the complex all night. We all thought the world was ending. They eventually found the guy hiding behind the record store (Turtle's, for the old-timers) we all worked at. Coincidentally, all the male members of my current band worked at Turtle's at about the same time (late 1980s). See? I managed to tie this all together...

vacuuming spiderwebs out of the shower

It occurred to me this morning as I was doing exactly what the title says that if I weren't so effing lazy, I would make an excellent clean freak. I hate dust and filth, and yet because I am so lazy, it tends to collect around me in great drifts. Swirling eddies of dog and cat hair, sloughed human skin cells, crumbs, and other sundry particulate matter. It takes me days, sometimes, to react to a particularly egregious build-up of munge. If were a potentate in a grande palace, it would literally be festooned with crapulence if it weren't for my retinue of loyal minions. Ah, for some minions.

WWIII, Part 2 - Dance of the Knuckleheads

MP George Galloway of the UK had this to say about the Iraqi insurgency:

"These poor Iraqis - ragged people, with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest and most basic of weapons - are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day, which has made the country ungovernable.

"We don't know who they are, we don't know their names, we never saw their faces, they don't put up photographs of their martyrs, we don't know the names of their leaders."

Here's the BBC story whence the quote cometh.

Galloway, who I though deserved an A++ for his sterling performance at the United States Senate a while back, calling out the warmongers and naming their abject failure for what it is, has now gone and pulled a Michael Moore by lumping the insurgency together as one big Glorious Resistance. Nevermind that some of these "Minutemen," as Mr. Moore called them, have a penchant for murdering other Iraqis in the streets. I don't doubt that some of the insurgents in Iraq are simply defending their homeland against foreign aggression, as should be expected. But others, many others, are misguided foreign jihadists or, worse still, opportunistic thugs taking advantage of the lawlessness brought on by American arrogance and incompetence (on the part of the Vulcans in the White House, not the boots) to craft their own little Mafia-style territories.

Or maybe the Iraqi insurgency is the intended result of a honeypot we've deliberately set up so we can "fight them over there" rather than fight them over here, as per the civilian leadership at the DoD:

SMERCONISH: I think somebody said at one of the events during the campaign that the choice is either to fight them over there or to fight them here. I'd rather fight them over there.

RUMSFELD: That's exactly right. I quite agree.

World War III, the long way

There was a fiery plane crash last night in Toronto.

At band practice, we talked about how it was "just a plane crash." No bombs, no hijackers, just an old-school, bad weather, slidin' off the runway plane crash. And nobody died. It wasn't another moment in the War.

I know two people who are on the front lines of this new war, this Third World War that is taking much longer than any of us who grew up in the Reagan years expected. One guy, a young Muslim of Pakistani descent, is a security guard for MARTA, Atlanta's commuter train system. He was hired to provide security for the people that go around and empty the token machines, and then London happened. He was issued new weapons and new rules of engagement. Shoot first. The other guy, an all-American former cop and triathelete, is working in Baghdad with a private security firm. He sends home emails full of Tom Clancy lingo and pictures of himself wearing a kufiya and an M4 assault rifle.

The Muslim guards the homeland; the Yank works for corporate interests in an occupied country. This is a bit of a false dichotomy, I know, based as it is on two casual acquaintances and not on any kind of scientific survey or formal information gathering. It's just a sidelong glance at the one of the quirks of this new world we all live in.

Random facts seem to add up to something, and then they don't. Conspiracies blossom and wither. There are wars and rumors of wars - which is how it has always been. (The Book of Revelations doesn't describe the End Times, but rather it condenses the whole of human history.) Did I mention that the Muslim security guard is married to a Catholic? That her huge drunk Irish family and his huge traditional Pakistani family celebrated together, just a few weeks ago?

Maybe we're not at war. Maybe they are, and we're just all caught in the middle. The ones who are so sure they know the true name of God, the ones who know what Heaven looks like, they're all trying to send us there. Trying to fulfill the prophecies.

Creationism by any other name...

Noted conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer has a piece in the current Time magazine that says what I was waiting for a real conservative to step up and say: Intelligent Design - or Creationism in a new dress with its hair done - is not science and does not belong in a science classroom. Teaching faith as science is bad for both. I'll let him tell it...

Inauguration Day

I'm starting this because I'm almost done with grad school and because previous blogs have blown up, petered out, run out of gas, and just plain stopped happening. I have this vision that soon, December to be exact, when I'm no longer a professional student, I'll be glad to have a place to hold forth and bloviate and so on. Plus also I'm not exactly writing a ton these days. Teachers and fellow students always ask me if I'm a writer, I guess because I give off that amonia reek of self-importance and import beer. And lately, I haven't been. I've been doing projects and writing little papers and article reviews for school.

I have a few meager goals for this next semester - I want to start writing songs again. (I play in a band with a woman who seems to fart out fully formed songs every morning as she rolls out of bed. She's always saying, "Here's one you guys haven't heard." And they're good.) I want to write some prose / poetry of the kind I was doing before I started graduate school. I don't expect to do anything with it, I just want to get it out there and then, every so often, look at it and say, "I made that." Like I do when I make poo.

And so then I says to her I says...






[this is a private joke for someone who will never see it]