talking to joey

Kaleidoscope of Good

The antennae on my truck was lost years ago in a car wash in Arizona I believe. I didn't listen to the radio much even before that, and I certainly can't listen to it now. So my vast collection of mp3s has been my sole source of listening for the past few years. Which hasn't bothered me because the radio largely blows. Satellite radio seemed to be kind of a cool way of listening to radio, though I was never convinced to actually get it. I'd heard of Pandora in the past, but never got much interested in it. But just recently I downloaded the iPhone application. Pandora is, put simply, internet radio. Except that it takes artists and songs you like and generates playlists of other artists you might like. I was never interested in internet radio because you can only access it from a computer. Well, the iPhone's basically a computer. The interesting thing about the iPhone app is that it actually streams this content over your cellphone signal. And strangely enough, I drove from work in Harrisburg back to my house and Pandora never once stopped or glitched. Which is exceptionally impressive because, while I started out in 3G territory near Harrisburg, I transitioned to regular Edge (2G) by the time I was home. And Pandora just kept on playing. Even when I got back to my house which has poor signal reception. When a song comes on in Pandora, you have the option to skip it if you don't like it, give it a thumbs up to help Pandora make future recommendations and you can also bookmark the song and/or artist. You can also press a button to immediately download the song from iTunes on your iPhone. This is a bit of an epiphany for me. This is the kind of radio I didn't even realize I wanted. I can drive and stream half-decent audio of artists I've never heard before and skip the ones I don't like as well as make note of the ones I do. And it's so simple to use and it just works.

I gave the Mac Pro a little test tonight... - 3 browser windows open - iTunes open and playing a song - IM client open - Twitter client open - Photoshop open - dvd player playing back Aqua Teen Hunger Force - 72 track Garage Band session with 72 compressors playing back ...all of this simultaneously. Seems ridiculous, I know. But when you're working with multitrack recordings with multiple plugins on each track, as well as a number of different software instruments, this kind of power makes the creative process flow so smoothly. As long as I've been recording, I've always been hampered by limitations; when I was using tape-based devices I was limited on track count. When I was using computers at the Small's studio I was limited by processing power and would have to deactivate plugins or bounce multiple tracks into one track to free up power. And it's these limitations that often times found me putting my guitar down in frustration and just shutting everything down. Getting a computer like the Mac Pro was a calculated decision to attempt to avoid these frustrations. I wanted something that would do more than what I would be likely to throw at it. I wanted something that was a bit overboard. I wanted to not lose the creativity. And I was willing to pay for that. (And Sarah, I'll try to keep the Mac-flapping to a minimum from here on out, though it'll be hard.)

Not only does Burn After Reading look like a rather interesting film (with a killer cast), the preview also features one of my favorite tracks from my favorite new band: "Grounds for Divorce" by Elbow. You may have seen their album covers popping up in my "recently listened to" list on the old blog sidebar lately. It was a surprise to hear the song come on during the preview since no one seems to have heard of them and since it was just a few months ago that I started listening to them.

(Via tweet from Neven Mrgan.)

Listening to Elbow's latest release "The Seldom Seen Kid", I was scrolling through the digital booklet that came with the iTunes download of the album. Reading through the credits, the very last thing written in the digital booklet was this (click for bigger image): I followed the link to www.turnmeup.org to discover the beginnings of (hopefully) a movement towards or at least the option for dynamic recordings again. I'd written about this in a previous post back when I was in recording school. I really didn't know if the recording industry would ever make a move in this direction or if we'd be permanently assaulted with levels slammed to digital zero.    What is dynamic according to this organization? They're currently in discussion about that:

We're currently considering a level as dynamic as records were in the pre-brickwall limiting era of the late 80's and early 90's. These records were not lacking for loudness, power or intensity, and their dynamics retained a lot of the emotion and excitement of the original performances. The key is that this level cannot be just slightly more dynamic. To have any meaning or significance it must be distinctly more dynamic than today's records.  

It'll be interesting to see if this leads anywhere.

After checking out Nils' Muxtape, I made my own tape . This is a great way to find new music. I've already bought a few songs of iTunes based off of what I've heard from other people's "tapes".

Sammie idly twirls the straw in what was left of her vanilla latte. Across from her I stare out the window of the library's coffee shop seeing my future as a single guy. "For most people," I say, "I think a wife and family's gotta be almost 75% of your life." "At least 50%," she replies. We're both single, and happily so. And it seems we have a mutual enjoyment of independence, road trips and starting out in totally new places. As she picked me up tonight, I laughingly accepted back one a copy of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf that I had loaned her a few years ago. Right before I left for Arizona. At that time, just as I had a journey and recording school in front of me, it was as though those plans were hills that blocked my view of the future and that I looked forward to tackling; obstacles to overcome, feats to achieve. And notions of what was beyond them were vague and uncertain, but optimistically so in an adventurous, bring-it-on kind of way. Brief examination of my love of singularity: * I don't have to report to anyone. * I can do things without needing someone else's ok. * I can not talk if I don't want to. * I could pick up and move if I felt so inclined. * I can play my guitar, write web code or read for hours at a time and not feel I'm neglecting someone. And but the list goes on. And I'm not polemicizing on why being single is better than being partnered; both have their merits and both consist of compromise. But compromise...it would kinda seem like being single means one doesn't have to compromise. But as I'm at the coffee shop looking out the window... "...so what do I do to fill up that 75%?" I ask. Sammie laughs agreeingly, "I know."

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After reading this article in Daily Kos about books that changed one's life, it didn't take me long to come up with Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf as the book that probably changed my life the most. Although I have to add that the book alone was just part of a series of books/events/films/music that all sort of arrived in my life at a similar and very poignant time. But more on that later. Without getting into a giant summary/analysis of the book, its general theme is of a man who is constantly pulled in two different directions between the "wolf of the steppes", the instinctual, almost animalistic nature of himself and the confines of human society. This book came to me, almost without thought, via Erin just after I graduated from college. It was a time when I really had no idea of what I should do. I'd had this notion for most of my senior year of taking a journey around the country; a giant road trip where I could just look at the land and think and write and take pictures.  I'd also just been a few months into an office job and felt two dichotomous sensations of dying spiritually and yet and increasing restlessness. These feelings upon second consideration don't seem to be so much opposed as they are correlated. I don't remember at what time during all this that I actually read Steppenwolf, but I remember having a truly skin-tingling experience of identification and serendipity at how this book fell into my hands at this exact moment in my life. I recall very well that I felt a very visceral, ominous fear at not only how alike the main character's feelings were to mine, but also a fear of this book that was speaking a truth to me that even I myself hadn't been able to either identify nor consider. Essentially the truth that I had to make some break from the "normal" life, whether permanent or temporary. This break came in the solidification of the plans to take the journey. (It sounds rather dramatic and maybe self-important, but that's how it felt at the time, and it really was an earth-shattering experience for me.) I'd say that the break continued in the form of Small's; a place where I gave up money, security and even freedom for the first time in my life, giving myself self to the proverbial something-bigger-than-yourself. Despite my dwindling love of the place towards the end, it occurred to me just today that that was the first time I worked a job that I didn't feel was interfering with my life. It really became my life. But I also always had the feeling that I couldn't stay there as permanence logically equated stagnation. And I'm still somehow on this trip. In a way. Steppenwolf was just the tip of the iceberg so to speak in terms of Hesse's influence on me. Oddly enough, my parents' had copies of both Hesse's Siddhartha and Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game, both of which I read along with pretty much every other book Hesse wrote. All have similar ideas and themes. And to put these books in some thematic context, I'd seen Fight Club and American Beauty that year, I'd been listening to John Mayer's Room For Squares which had numerous songs involving driving, escape and restlessness (referring, unforgettably in "Why Georgia", to the "quarter-life crisis"), and, after acquiring my truck, I took more drives than I think I ever had before, pretty much living in my truck each night after work until about midnight. So it was multiple things coming together at once that promulgated the epiphany-like experience. Each came to me seemingly by chance and yet the underlying theme of everything was not only obvious, but chilling for me. Of all of them though, the reading of Steppenwolf was the by far the most eye-opening and life changing. Perhaps a re-read is in order here very soon.

And the Band Played Badly - New York Times A great article by Alexander McCall Smith about a group of bad musicians in Scotland who really want to play in an orchestra. They found the Really Terrible Orchestra and actually gain an audience. Funny and well written; I'll probably check out some of the books he's written based on his writing style in the article.

Back in 2006 while I was still working at Small's, Frank Black, former lead singer of the Pixies, played at Small's theater and took advantage of the live multi-tracking package they offered. The job of running the recording session was handed to me. And I've done some live recordings before, (GWAR, Liz Berlin, Mike Vallely's band) but I never really thought I'd see any published results from these. After stumbling across Black's album "93-03" on iTunes tonight, I saw that the album had some live tracks from his North American tour. Curious, I started searching the internet for information on where these tracks were recorded, and if the information in this web page is correct, then I have have some published engineering work (9 tracks, to be precise) on a somewhat majorly-distributed record. (It's the 5th paragraph down in the article.) ...and actually, I've found the same press-release on this person's blog too. Wow. Makes my kinda giddy in a way. I might pick up the album just to see if my name's actually in the credits. It's kinda funny how, at literally a minimum wage salary, you can still be briefly and yet closely associated with moderately well-known people.