i_heartdynamics

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:35:23 GMT

Livejournal started using ads on unpaid accounts if the viewer isn't logged in. I only like the internet when it's free. (Or, when it makes things that would otherwise cost money, free.)

Labor Day Festival
Hamtramck, MI
Sep.1, 2008
8.43pm

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:50:57 GMT

Last week kind of sucked. I had an "incident" and my mother (who knew I was having a rough week) was kind enough to call me Saturday morning and say, "Michael! What's a 5-letter word for 'softly' in music-speak?"

Oh my...

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From the I Live In A F**king Trash Can department...

-Me, too, Ron Rosenbaum. Me, too.

-J.Paul Getty on the 4 different types of people in the world. (From Playboy, vol.10, issue no.1, January 1963)

Construction Workers
Hamtramck/Highland Park/Detroit, MI
Aug.6, 2008
11.38pm

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:43:16 GMT

Hey everybody, Big News.

Nunu
Hamtramck, MI
August 19, 2008
8.48am

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:13:20 GMT

no one says i dont think its over (like you do)
320kbps mp3

Palace of Versailles
Versaille, France
(by D.Spinelli)
Unknown Date

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:53:36 GMT

Moog should make something that can do this stuff.

Niteclub+Hair Salon
Hamtramck, MI
Aug.10, 2008
11.45am

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 07:56:22 GMT

"A Traveler's Diagram"

One of my favorite things to do at work is archive slides. There's one guy who's about to retire that brings in a lot of them. After I told him how to steal Fats Domino records off the internet, he told me I could use the images for whatever I want (like I said, he's about to retire and he seems to be of that class of person that's less sad about it and more like, "F**k this work s**t"). I can't find the disc... I think it's out in my car... But I started this with the intention of posting one of a bunch of buses sitting outside (the palace at) Versailles circa 1970-something. They look like something out of Munich or one of those other period pieces.

Oh well.

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-Funniest things I read this week: (here and here)

-Regarding the latter, I'm referring to the sub-headline (something about grown women acting like teenagers). I saw Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants. One of my ex-girlfriends (whom I mentioned a few entries back) "made" (looked as promising as most other movies) me watch it and I liked it okay.

-Regarding the former, I'm referring to the sentence where Lessenberry says: "...as I write this he is still denying fathering her baby. That's certainly plausible to me; I visit single women and their babies in the Beverly Hills Hotel all the time." Most insightful and reasonable things I've seen on the Edwards scandal are here and here.

-If I don't mention it now, I never will, but while I can't actually say "Bro's before Ho's" out loud (much less subscribe to the doctrine), amongst other things, it appears to be an institution that protects men from disagreement vs. opposition.

-Speaking of disagreement vs. opposition, I was involved in a romantic relationship with another man's wife. The circumstances were probably about as normal as they get (they married really young and I get the feeling that - for my generation - the only things keeping the divorce rate from reaching 95-100% will be religious fundamentalism, 2nd marriages, and premature death), but I noticed that when they found out, even my most open-minded and "sensitive" guy friends tended to say, "Alright!" or "Good job!" with the tone of voice that one might associate with high-fives. The woman I was involved with kind of acted like whichever Candace Bushnell character she liked best that week (that's a really nice way of putting it). After awhile, I didn't behave very well, either. I tried to for a very long time and then gave up.

The premise is pretty loaded, so the longer it went on, the more behaving honestly and/or with dignity stopped being an option. Which brings up the real issue: It's not really about who behaves the best or who behaves the worst or who's to blame. It was really, really sad. I've been involved in or on-the-cusp-of a lot of really, really sad situations and it was definitely up there with the worst of them. And at its best and worst moments, it played-out, ended, and lived on like most other crappy situations going on around me. I recognize that there's a degree of relevance and necessity, but if the media abstains (completely, regardless of any developments) from writing about the personal lives of the Edwards family (Man Fucks Woman, Breaks Best Friend's Heart, Dying Wife Says Moon Told Her About It After Being Abducted By Aliens In Grassy Knoll - OMG, WHO'S HE TALKING TO!?!?!?!?), I'll personally pay for Commander Oefelein to attend one of Jeremy Snitkins men's retreats.

-Judith Beerman responding to Snitkin's Aug.2009 bong loaded op-ed on the how the Promise Keepers is actually a secret society of "Funbag Punchers" can be found here

.

Lite-Hammer of +3 Poor Taste
Detroit, MI
Aug.9, 2008
12.39am

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:16:08 GMT

itsnevergoodbyeuntilyoureallymeanit (i like to watch)
(256kbps mp3)
(320kbps mp3)
(lyrics)

w/spoken word by:
-Dr. Raymond Stantz
-Dr. Playthell Benjamin
-Christopher Hitchens
-Prison Mike

Stevens T. Mason (w/[What Appears To Be] Bird Shit Splattered Across His Head)
Detroit, MI
Aug.1, 2008
6.33pm

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:01:17 GMT

-This is awesome.

-So is this.

-And this. (Would make Nicola Six blush.)

(The letters for the 1st and 3rd - I didn't look at those pertaining to the Walsh column - have been really good.)

-Sometime last week, I was hanging out with a regional buyer-and-seller of used and vintage guitar equipment (he's put together some of my favorite Michigan indie+art rock guitar rigs). The nature of his work means he comes across other things, too. (For instance, this Corvette is his.) For awhile, he was driving a big white van he bought from one of the regional zoos. It had zebras painted on the side (that he had done his best to scrape off). When I asked him why he isn't driving it anymore, he said (without a hint of irony or self-deprecation): "I got rid of it because I drive like an asshole and people kept calling the zoo to complain."

(Which was the funniest thing I've heard in awhile.)

Detroit, MI
Aug.5, 2008
11.57pm

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 05:32:53 GMT

Vanity Fair should send Dave Hickey or Christopher Hitchens to interview Steve Reich. ("How cool would that be?")

-Pitchfork on Daniel Variations
-Steve Reich on Daniel Variations
-Daniel Pearl Foundation

School
Detroit, MI
Aug.1, 2008
6.02pm

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 05:20:43 GMT

"The Christians Gave Me Comic Books As If I Would Be Scared Of Burning In Hell (I Was Already There)"

I bought subscriptions to a couple of my favorite magazines. I've been doing this On-My-Own In A Major City-thing for about a year now and it's something I think I can treat myself to. I still don't have much money (with gas, utilities, rent, and every day stuff like oil changes, my living expenses are still well over $1500/month). Still, they're cheap and I think I'm going to pick up a couple new ones every month.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this was to "cultivate distance" (credit where credit is due, my friend). I use quotations because the internet is still a stupid place where a redneck, a monarch, and a gangsta can all come by here driven by impulse, self-loathing, and a plethora of other factors, read this, and blow-up without stopping to think about the unique premise that is someone else's life. So, of course, it becomes one big political mess and perpetuates intellectual dishonesty that's already reached epidemic proportions. Uni-Lateral Disorder is a plague that could kill us all. Still, I love to be here on the Shadownet. If I can't stop it, I'm going to stand here and enjoy the show. It's an interesting time to be alive. There are a lot of guys standing outside Ophuls' "Palace of Power" and a few of us are less interested in throwing rotten tomatoes and more interested in hearing what they have to say.

I don't care to launch anyone into hysterics by using a phrase that could be interpreted as distancing myself for the sake of safety (burden), fame (luxury), reputation (something one has to earn), and other things that are seen as essential to a truly delusional society. (Whatever happened to food, water, and shelter?). Still, in that Mark Twain sort of way, it's the right phrase. I'm not exactly sure why and I've searched far and wide on the Information Dirt Road trying to find someone who does. If you find him, let me know. If you want to try it yourself, more power to you, I wish you luck.

I've had torture rhetoric used to (literally) slander me. Since I know what's going on and know the score and took some time to apologize to the people I wronged (and in the process, apologize to myself as well), I don't care about anyone else's perspective on that situation. Never have, never will. But knowing that sort of thing has lead me to believe the internet has a tendency to lean towards perpetuating intellectual dishonesty. In that regard, even if I have something good to say, I think one needs to tread lightly when it comes to being an active citizen here, because every time one uses it to open someone up to genuine and substantive feedback, one is also opening them up to the disingenuous and dishonest sort.

I started a letter to the editors of Salon in reference to this, but never finished it. It (the letter, not the article) was about why people insist on bickering about whether the war was justified or not in the first place. My take on that is that an ideal war is one where no one really appreciates or understands why it was there in the first place (which, like a lot of things in life, is exactly the same as an unideal war that blows up in one's face). And for reasons too numerous to get into, it's one of those things that was Just Going To Happen. There are plenty of members of the silent majority that remember Pearl Harbor and what it was like to have Someone Is Trying To Conquer The World hanging over their heads. A lot of them have died in the past 8 years. My grandfather was one of them.

I love blogging about Grandpa. Grandpa was a bad-ass, and anyone who knows me (or reads this) has had to hear about him. And for all the ridicule I've been subjected to, talking about him feels relevant. And I finally realize why in a way that may make sense to others. One day, my grandmother mailed me a bunch of pictures of my grandfather, and she attached a note to the picture of his community college football team explaining how I could identify Gerritt as well as informing me that the coach was Gerald R. Ford.

So, I linked this article about Hitchens being waterboarded. And it's in one of the issues I received the other day (thank you, Mandy - they were in my mailbox that same day. I'm assuming you put them there yourself - it's nice to know that someone still appreciates magic in this era of fake-ass reason). And for some reason (probably the same reason I don't read many of their 10 page articles online), having a paper version made it easier to realize he makes a statement in an otherwise excellent article that's just kind of floating around in a sea of (what seems like) reason. Albeit the Reason of a man who just quit smoking It's hard to tell if it's the sign of an oil spill or an honest mistake, like detritus from a cruise ship or sailing yacht that went unnoticed.

The passage is here (starting with "When contrasted...").The reason it doesn't add up is this:

...to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Sounds familiar. Didn't phrase it in the form of a question, either. The thing about people like Hitchens (or Kamiya, or this Greenwald guy, or any other pundit or polemic) is that everything they say is like Jenga. If they build a good argument, you can pull pieces off the bottom without the whole tower falling. I have to read the article a few more times to figure out if his tower is bullshit or not.

To triangulate that part of it with what I said above with the bit in my letter to Emily Magazine about the Kent, Ottawa, and Muskegon tri-county area (in Michigan), he's denying his own bottom line. We kill those people every fucking day. We rape their women, we kill their children, and then they chop off the head of a Wall Street journalist. And it all fucking sucks. But Hitchens came to America for the same reason Judy P. Couchpot leaves Assfuck, MN for Los Angeles. And, he quit smoking. I know what that's like (I think once a smoker, it's reasonable to always be a smoker in some capacity). I really like what he does and think he's pretty rad when he's on his A-Game.

But in West Michigan (where I grew up), people like Gerald R. Ford are our community college football coaches, people like Erik Prince are the captain of our swim teams, and we get in fender-benders with members of the Devos family. Our uncles are climbing the corporate ladder at Alticor and the guy who we trust to put together our custom speaker cabinets (for our super-sweet guitar rigs) and does front-of-house ("sound") at DEMF (Detroit Electronic Music Festival) is a 3rd generation Amway salesperson. The people I mention in the letter I sent to EmMag are the main purveyors of the atrocities that go on there. These are some of the wealthiest people in the world and they make Warren Buffet look like the fucking tooth fairy. They build private armies (that have been conspicuously absent from the news recently). They don't try to monopolize the economy on the open market, they do it by trying to build an exclusive micro-economy. It's really, really scary. They're blonde-haired, blue-eyed white people and they do it all in the name of Christ. Not God, not Allah, not Yahweh, but literally For Christ's Sake.

No man wants to end up like his father and not many understand that every man inevitably does. It's almost irresponsible to state the concept without extensive exploration, but it's a notion that holds up in terms of the Bottom Line. The fact that my handwriting looks just like my dad's is out of my control, but what I do with a pen is all "on me." Whether literally or figuratively, a family is a business. A part of me thinks taking some time to be an active citizen did little other than leave a bad taste in my mouth. It's like a romantic relationship - I feel like a significant part of my life revolves around people I respect and/or admire resenting me for being right about things that aren't worth being right about in the first place. It doesn't feel good to have someone you put your trust in slit your throat and try to sail away in your boat and it doesn't feel good to have journalists, academics, and intellectuals beat you with a Hammer of +3 Intellectual Dishonesty.

Sometimes it does... But that's beside the point. I think Hitchens quit smoking and Juan Cole doesn't have a lot of people saying, "Hey man - careful what you're saying to those kids..." Which is fine, whatever. I'm just a blogger. I don't know shit. But "sufficiently adult" my ass. When I was really young, my dad mentored a guy who was the age I am now. Fathers never get along with their sons and this guy needed a father figure. He had just come back from the first Iraq war. We were at an Air Show (sort of a car show for War Machines) and I remember my surrogate brother kneeling and talking to me about war: Look, you can't talk to your friends at school about stuff like what I'm going to tell you, but, War is Hell, Michael. People say that, but they don't think about what it means. And I want you to know what it means. And what's going on over there isn't what they tell you it is. They tell you that Saddam's army hates him so much they all surrender without a fight. They don't tell you that there's too many of them that think America is a free ride and the soldiers hate them. There are so many of them, that sometimes when we're driving down the road, we'll see them lined-up along the road or they'll come running towards us to surrender and instead of arresting them, soldiers just shoot and kill them and laugh about it. Like it's a game.

One way or the other, our next president is going to be a fucking liar because all the lead paint regulations in the world don't do a goddamn thing for the people in our country that have no choice but to defecate where they eat (some of them live in my neighborhood). Somebody with some tact and couth needs to invoke the Star Trek Principle on the people talking about the war. I don't care what your sexual preference is, after that sort of crap goes on long enough, you have to choose between fighting or making out.

(Hollywood and The Green Zone 4-evah! Right, guys? Right? Guys?)

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-I ran into Jack Lessenberry the other day. I've been a fan of his for a really long time. The second people started looking at this, I thought, Fuck, man - what would that Lessenberry do... (I always thought that one of the best and underused blog models is a "responsible" - or "well-informed" - opinion column.) I realized it was him once it was too late to say "Hi," but I know he stole my magic. If I don't stop him, he's going to end up funnier than the Havrilesky woman. And that's No Good.

-The rest of the aforementioned letter to the editors of Salon is here. There was also something correlating muck-raking with the idea that I'm not quite sure what a "Writer At Large" is. I think if Kamiya or Joan Walsh say they do, they're lying.

-I erased the dates from the e-mail exchange with Simon Raymonde I posted recently because it said he sent his three hours before receiving my question. I assume that's because it was an intercontinental conversation and one end was being held up over a Blackberry. In reality, he got back to me in about half-an-hour. I didn't edit it other than to delete a blank space before the "J" in Japan. My point is, who the fuck types that well on their Blackberry?

Will G.+Granddaughter
Hamtramck, MI
June 22, 2008
10.29pm

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:32:07 GMT

When I started working at my job, I didn't really talk to anyone. I'd go in really early, do tape transfers, drink coffee, monitor my CCTV and listen to Miles Davis and Stars of The Lid. Sometimes I'd go down to the basement of the building and instruct ESL (English as a second-language students) how to access networks and what-not, or run errands around campus. Then one day, the full-time tech came in and he turned out to be this older, open-minded guy who does (and has done) a lot of cool stuff in the local A/V community and has a respectable freelance resume going back into the early 90s.

Thursday morning, he came in and we started having one of those conversations that, rather than repeat verbatim, is better to just map out. (This->this->this.)

To summarize and/or elaborate, whenever that guitar line comes on (in the Rolling Stones cover The Mrs. and I did), people who know a lot about and/or really love music almost invariably bring up U2. Usually, they don't say it sounds like U2, it's more like the sort of behavior that goes along with subtle product placement ("Have you ever heard the U2 song..."). Which stands to reason. I was using a lot of the same gear that Edge guy used (an E/H Memory Man+analog chorus) and had a really pristine signal chain at the time (fancy pre-amp, high end AD/DA conversion, etc. - for the truly geeky, a Marshall JMP-1->Lexicon MX200->EMU 1820M->Cubase SX3) and partially because I dedicated that part of my life to having a handle over process and theory to the point that I'd be able to use them for 95% of pre-production. (Lyrics and a quick set of arbitrary chord changes being the other 5%.) The better one gets at what one is doing seems to result in being able to rely on the idea that "If it doesn't sound bad, it probably sounds good." My "in" chain was really good at the time, but my monitoring chain (and my patience) were shit. So, there's an ambient bed that people inevitably struggle to hear and focus on simply because I left it lower in the mix than I would have liked.

I'm not sure about the specifics, but Michael Brook was somehow involved with U2/Eno in that era and his thing at the time was the Infinite Delay system, something I by default replicate to an extent by using a lot of long, rhythmically calculated delays. It's also been the subject of several lawsuits. While there are only three people in the world who have an Infinite Guitar, the technology isn't quite rocket science, so a lot of people ended up having E-Bow's and Fernandes Infinite Sustainors.

Prior to making Infinite Guitar a proper noun, when trying not to use the term twice, I was inclined to call it his "Delayer Doohicky" or his "Sustaining Thingamajig" ("Dilznoofus The Big Headed Scientist That Invented Sound's Flying Machine Made Out Of White People"). Thanks to my co-worker, my poor sense of humor has been rendered obsolete.

Before I get to that, my co-worker is a generation, generation-and-a-half older than me and is really good with a lot of technology that I'm not familiar with that's being (or already has been) phased out. He has a really cool freelance resume going back into the 90's. Stuff that's being or has been phased out is - to a reasonable extent - a luxury. There is little difference between the function of an old Helios console and a '67 Mustang.

I'm pretty sure changes in culture and technology have brought a new kind of person into that particular trade/industry. The full-time guy is kind of a hybrid of my generation and the generation before him. I know a few guys from the generation before me, but the generation before them is something I'm still trying to learn more about. I'm talking about these guys like Tom Dowd and Eddie Ciletti, these guys who worked on the Manhattan Project and are less like this guy and more like a high school shop teacher.

And apparently, there was a full-time guy who was there for two-or-three decades. I guess he was really well-liked around the university. He passed away prematurely and there are plaques and park-benches dedicated to his contribution. He was in the office a long time before the two of us. And I guess he was one of these guys like Eddie Ciletti and Tom Dowd.

Anyway, after talking about the Fernandes Sustainor and the E-bow, my co-worker says, "Have you ever heard of The Gizmotron?" Nope. But we looked it up on the office computer and it turned out to be one of the finest pieces of GhettoTek I've ever had the pleasure of being aware of. It is to the E-bow what early flying machines are to the airplane. The wikipedia article only listed 4 known instances it's been put to tape. One of them was someone I know, so I e-mailed him about it.

------Original Message------
From: M Greenbriar
To: Simon Raymonde
Sent:
Subject: Gizmotron

I'm writing something about esoteric gear. Is there any way I could talk you into giving me a quote about your experience with The Gizmotron? As far as I can tell, you're one of a handful of people that's actually used it and put it to tape.

Best,
Mike in Detroit

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: simon
Date:
Subject: Re: Gizmotron
To: M Greenbriar

Well, memory is hazy on how we actually got it (it was 25 bleedin years ago!), but it came attached to some really shit guitar and I think it may have come from a shop in Notting Hill called Record and Tape Exchange which was ostensibly just that, a place to exchange your record and tapes! It graduated to the shop next door which in turn became a place to find old bits of gear, pedals, etc, and I think we got it there. Believe it or not I found a mellotron in there for £25!! Brought it home in a taxi there and then! (Used on many earlier Cocteau Twins songs. We changed the tapes on it and that was a total pain in the backside also!)

As for the gizmotron I only remember using it on one song on a record called It'll End It Tears by a 4AD collective called This Mortal Coil, vainly described by some as "the first indie supergroup"! Not by me I should add!!) and whilst the novelty value and eccentric sound suited the mood of that album, it was hard to get a whole take without the wheels sticking or a note not coming through properly. I was only like 21 years old at the time so had grit, determination and youthful exuberance on my side and I got a take that Ivo, the guy behind TMC seemed to like so that was that. Wrote the part and recorded it all in about an hour. Practised a bit on the gizmo at our studio space but you could never get proficient at it, cos it was a fundamentally flawed design. Ours was white and looked a bit plastic-y and was housed on this shockingly ugly guitar. When we eventually took it off, we realised why. The mess it makes of your guitar is insane. So why you would want to mount it on a nice guitar I have no idea. Cos you couldn't ever take it off again without it destroying your guitar! With effects like delay, reverb and feedback you could make a tremendous sound, potentially, but recording was not particularly fruitful, as you were usually only ever a second or two from a foul grinding noise from the motor coming through on the pickup!

We took it off the guitar with a view to mount it on one of our nice guitars but we never got round to it. God knows what ever happened to it. We ran a recording studio with random people in and out all the time and I guess over the years, whilst I remember it being 'in a box' in the loft, one day many years later when we were clearing out, it just wasn't there any more. The curio value is the only value, as whilst I love inventions and eccentric oddities, this went the way of the Sinclair C5, a battery operated car that was a laughing stock or the Hair Blocker (a Japanese invention the looked like a choirboys ruffle that you wore on your face like a sunflower, which was supposed to stop your hair falling in your noodles). It didn't do what it was meant to do, but hey it was a great idea!

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-Letters to the editor of Emily Magazine (here and here) (I've never mowed a lawn, but after hearing "It's Jimmy Kimmel Live!!!!!!!!" for the 12 thousandth time, I started to understand how this guy feels.)

-Letters to the editors of Salon (here and here)

-I mentioned in the first letter to EmMag that it was a strange day in my personal blog saga. I haven't blogged about Detroit because there's a few things floating around and for better or for worse (intellectual curiosity vs. morbid fascination), I want to see how it plays out. But the best part about it is that Thursday was 2000 times more bizarre. Partly because I didn't know anything about it until today. When I started this blog, it was to take notes. I'd write around things because I thought someday I'd write about them. With all this talk about Bono and my pet-belief that George W. Bush might not have been very good at it, but he's still our president and may make some Cool decisions on his way out, I think chickens, eggs, and Pigmen are a terrible thing to waste.

-Ebow

-Michael Brook (Sound On Sound interview)

-Fernandes Sustainor

-Article On Delia Derbyshire floating around office Thurday morning (+On Mu-Tron)

Breakfast (@Lager House)
Detroit, MI
July 20, 2008
12.25am

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:23:52 GMT

Several years ago, I started dating (and subsequently living with) a girl from my hometown that I knew from "back in the day." She'd always been an overachiever and it turned out she wasn't doing anything with her life (she's a nice girl, I love her to death, and it bears mentioning that she wasn't happy about it). We hadn't spoken in years, and I expressed my shock and awe about her static situation by saying (in jest): Really? I thought you'd be working for Vanity Fair 'or something' by now...

To which she replied, "Isn't, that, like, one of those magazines like Cosmo or Glamour or something like that?"

I can't (and don't) blame her for thinking that. That's a common misconception. And not altogether unfair. Yeah, they'll run a piece where they ask Ivanka Trump which of her 10k pairs of shoes she likes best, but if don't care, you can turn the page and find out who Deep Throat is. Like a lot of things in life, it's more complicated than rhetoric allows.

One day, I came home with a shirt displaying the Playboy bunny. And she threw a fucking fit. (For simplicity's sake, she's a "punk-rock, feminist, zine-making" type.) I've always wanted something with the logo on it for reasons I can't quite put into words. The image is stark, yet warm-and-fuzzy and tastefully elegant. And it's iconic. I've tried explaining to a thousand different people a thousand different times that I really do like it for the articles. I don't think I've ever met someone who didn't say, "Oh yeah, right, you 'just read it for the articles.'" Even now, I don't wear the shirt very often. I've yet to walk 100 yards to the grocery store without being subjected to cat-calling (from both men and women). I almost never wear it when I go out. I don't mind ridicule so much, but at a certain point, the image on the shirt is iconic enough that it isn't functionally practical to wear.

The best explanation I've been able to come up with (regarding why one might actually read Playboy for the articles) is: I really can't speak for anyone else. But, while I'm not above looking at pictures of naked women, the last place I'd go to find them is Playboy. I don't know if you've ever looked at the women they tend to feature, but... I think it goes without saying Dale Earnhardt and I have very different taste in women.

Meaning, the sort of woman they tend to feature is usually someone like Dale Earnhardt's wife (or Anna Nicole Smith, or Denise Richards). The sort of women I've (for whatever reason) never been attracted to. Anyone who knows me in "real life" knows the women I end up with usually don't look like Playboy centerfolds. That's not to say they aren't beautiful (they invariably are). I usually end up with women who look smart and confident. I don't think there are any women out there who wouldn't understand what I mean when I say the operative word in that sentence is "look." (Meaning, their physical appearance reflects their self-image, not the other way around.)

That's not to say I think the women who pose in Playboy are dumb and have low self-esteem. Come to think of it, I don't really care one way or the other about pictures of naked women... It doesn't matter. The point of this fantabulous blog entry is that I ran across a stack of old Playboys the other night at a friend's house and thought this picture illustrates my point. I haven't read it in awhile, but last I knew, it's one of the better mainstream publications out there and it's a shame smart people pass it over just because of dumb-shit rhetoric.

Vintage Playboy
Hamtramck, MI
July 19, 2008
11.12pm

------------------------------------------------------------

-Funniest thing I read today: Leaving the train station I passed a man wearing a shirt with "I listen to bands that don't even exist yet," scrawled across his chest. (From this.)

-This is awesome.

-So is this. One of my co-workers does sound there sometimes and he called over to see if they (Matmos) were going to do anything interesting. I guess they're going to do the show in quad. (Four channels of sound as opposed to the usual two). He also says that room sounds like shit. If it's the room I'm thinking of, it's a lot like the Hammer atrium, only it has a ceiling. Gross.

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:23:36 GMT

It looks like an article from The Onion. Especially with the pictures. (pic1) (pic2)

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:34:48 GMT

Nice.

CCTV
Detroit, MI
July 2, 2008
9.42am

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:02:12 GMT

detroit counterpoint no.1 (for Dave Hickey)
(256kbps mp3)
Recorded July 12, 2008, mixed July 13-15, 2008, Detroit/Hamtramck, MI

Hamtramck, MI
June 28, 2008
12.34am

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:34:29 GMT

A couple weeks ago, I asked someone if they had ever read Amis' Experience. I didn't know what to expect from the response, and was nothing short of surprised when she said: No! Should I?

A couple years ago, some people from my hometown descended on Detroit for a weekend to attend a concert and a Tigers game. At one point, one of them said something to the effect of how she really, really wanted to read something funny, and I suggested reading A Confederacy of Dunces. You should check it out, I said. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in my life.

To which she replied in that oh-so-familiar and condescending tone: "I don't read things like that, Mike. I only read old books."

Alright then. Now, it's no secret I don't have a very high-opinion of our nation's attitude. I think the CDC needs to spend a little less time on whatever they're doing right now and start cracking away at the short-man syndrome that's reached epidemic proportions. Maybe take a look at the fact that we're all prone to behaving like our wealthy great-Aunt Judy is on her death bed and the bitter old hag could use a friend. Pete Townshend once said something to the effect of "It seems like it would be difficult to be a smart young-person in America who doesn't live in a place Los Angeles or NYC." He's right, too. I'm 27 and sadly, have achieved the de facto status of being a closet Anthony Burgess fan. This is due to the fact that I've never actually met someone else who enjoys and appreciates his work. On occasion, I'll hand someone a copy of The Wanting Seed and say, You should check this out, and too often (and almost invariably) been told, "Oh, I'm not reading that. It's just a rip-off of 1984." (Simply because it deals with dystopia.) Whether that (it being a rip-off - Orwell and Burgess had a strange dynamic) is true or not, I honestly don't know. What I do know it's an oversimplification (a very telling one, at that) of a work by a complex, brilliant individual. And every time I hear someone say I'm not reading that because I paid a lot of money (tuition) to read 1984, they'll end up reading it a year down the road and love it, but only when no one who heard them say "it's just a rip-off of 1984" is around to see them doing so.

So back to my story: The person who said it was a nice young lady (same age as me) who I had never gotten to know in any capacity beyond casual observation resulting from traveling in a few of the same social circles. She was always around, but I knew next to nothing about her. My roommate at the time was also from my hometown. He had a crush on her and (naturally, and adorably) talked about her a lot and I was surprised to learn she had attended a small, private liberal arts school for women in Boston and that she and I shared many of the same favorite authors and "thinkers." I also learned that we had a common interest in an oft neglected facet of social justice (the rights of the disabled). All of that combined with the nature of the setting (a bar) led me to respond to her remark about "old books" by saying (in that just-short of chipper, uber-diplomatic and non-threatening voice I learned from Ms.G-Man way back in the day):

No, I know exactly what you mean. I used to feel the same way. A couple years ago, I picked up a piece of contemporary fiction I'd been carrying around years (it was Confederacy of Dunces, actually) and read it to take my mind off of DT'ing. By the time I was finished, I realized I was probably missing out on some really great stuff. I think sometimes underachievers and people who feel like they're wasting their twenties glorify and deify authors who are perceived as being more "exotic" for the same reason people our age glorify the civil rights movement or the anti-war movement of the 60's while being skeptical and rhetorical about current issues. It's easy, fashionable, and doesn't require one to step outside one's comfort zone or take any chances. There are a lot of authors right now doing good work. In certain circles, it isn't safe to champion Houellebecq the way we champion Sarte. I think that rather than depreciate Houellebecq simply because he's writing another book as we speak, we should have the sense to not put Sarte on such a pedestal.
...
...
Point being, check out Confederacy of Dunces. It's really funny.

That seems like a pretty awful, horrible, long-winded response to a seemingly simple (yet heavily-inflected) statement. It also sounds kind of catty. It really isn't and rarely comes across as such. I think the thing about being in one's twenties is that one is surrounded by people who have this overwhelming feeling they're wasting them (their twenties). The people who spend all their time worrying about the status of the person next to them seem bitter and miserable and the one's who take their mind off of it by consistently stepping outside their comfort zone (whether moving to a new city on the other side of the country, getting involved in the international textile trade during their junior year of college, or skydiving in their free-time) are the one's that are always doing awesome things with their lives. I got an e-mail from one such person yesterday. She's from the same region/socio-economic background as myself, quit working for the world's most famous and progressive architect a couple years ago, and is now working for the world's most progressive and innovative animation company. I'd hate her for being so awesome, but I'm holding out for when she decides to take up music and ends up joining Bang On A Can or playing drums for Michael Brook.

That said, I’ve been reading a lot of Martin Amis texts over the past month. Specifically, Experience (his memoirs) and The War Against Cliché (a collection of essays and reviews). I’ve been a fan of Salman Rushdie for almost 15 years, and my appreciation of Christopher Hitchens is no secret. On discovering Martin Amis, I was surprised to learn that he, Hitchens, and Rushdie are friends, which inevitably lead me to compare and contrast their work. It also lead me to the “which of them do I like the best or relate to the most,” train of thought.

To some, it might seem strange to do this in my blog. For anyone who might be confused as to what my motives are (and for the benefit of those inclined to raise their voice in the "Everything You Know, I Knew Yesterday" chorus), I'll simply cite Amis himself. In Experience, while recounting a particularly traumatic episode in his life (the removal of his teeth), Amis described the importance of keeping the company of other toothless writers in his head. My teeth are fine, but as the years go by, I find myself in increasingly complicated situations and have found that if one decides to put one's trust in a well-developed philosophy to guide one's life by, one will inevitably find that at times, one is on one's own.

Another way to look at it is anyone who's inclined to think about things with little-to-no precedent understands that oftentimes, one will feel an idea click before long before one is able to express it in a way that will make sense to others. Much of what Amis says serves as a leg-up in this regard. For instance, in the previous example, Amis might be writing about teeth, but what he says also applies to the sort of ridicule Emily Gould has been subjected to. While I'm sure she's done some reprehensible things in her time (everyone has to some degree), and aside from the fact that even though I've never seen them, I'd be willing to bet my left-arm her teeth are fine (anyone who grew up in America during that era with parents that qualified as "professional" will most likely go an entire lifetime without having an all-out dental crisis), it's telling that she was the target of mass ridicule simply for writing a blog post about Liz Phair being a role model. Keeping good company in one's head is universal and can be used to triangulate other notions. I guess there was a big To-Do surrounding some guy who wrote a memoir about being a drug addict. I've never read it and only recently familiarized myself with the "controversy" and I'm not sure which is more telling: That it's a subject that there's no feasible reason or need for embellishment or that he received endless expressions of gratitude from Oprah followers who read those embellishments. Or, that anyone gave a flying fuck in the first place.

Amis also wrote that it's important and natural to "wrestle" with one's favorite authors and thinkers. While it's true that blogs are generally considered to be a culture with a set of rules that's already been determined, that's total bullshit and reflects the fact that we're an idiot society buried in our own fear. We've been trained (in a fashion similar to the way I have to retrain my dog on occasion) to think if we just follow the rules (whether "radical" or uber-conservative), we'll thrive on earth and live forever. And that if we find one of the rules isn't to our liking, we break when no one is looking and then pretend we didn't, as opposed to questioning it honestly and fairly. For the most part, the mainstream media would like blogs to Stay Stupid and Attention Hungry so they can open sweatshops and feed off the little guy (I can't find the link, but this Greenwald guy went into it sometime in the last year. I like his stuff, but whatever his perspective on it was felt like it perpetuated the problem). The result is a culture (and I notice my Canadian friends don't seem so corrupted in this way) that is heading towards making the intellectually curious equivalent to a witch in Salem or a black in rural Mississippi circa 1965.

As someone who is very (and innocently) intellectually curious, I've actively wrestled with rhetoric (one will notice how quick it is to declare "war"). It doesn't make sense, is essentially "free-floating hatred" without regard for ethics or respect (for its target or itself) and is the product of a hive mind operating under the pretense of being rewarded for having no agenda beyond the quest for attention . Which hardly makes it something that should be avoided at all costs. Quite the contrary. If one has the time and energy, it's worth engaging in any and every way possible. Or don't engage it and watch it become increasingly desperate, obsessive, nonsensical, and violent like any other form of fanaticism.

Point being, I've never read any of Rushdie's non-fiction. I started reading Rushdie when I was 13 or 14. I saw an article about East/West in Entertainment Weekly and stumbled upon the text while at the library. It was probably the last thing to profoundly affect me before I started embarking on serious creative endeavors. Even this morning I was using lines from it in a song I'm working on. He has been and always will be a massive influence on anything I do that's of a creative nature, regardless of medium. He's written 2 of the 4 books that immediately come to mind when asked what my favorite of all time is, and they'll never be replaced. The list will simply expand.

Hitchens came later on. If he's ever written fiction (or poetry), I'm not aware of its existence. Experience lent quite a bit of insight into why his work strikes a chord. There was a chapter where Amis and Hitchens were driving to rural Vermont to spend a night at Saul Bellow's place. Hitchens had never met Bellows (who was sort of a father figure to Amis), and on the way there, Amis made sure Hitchens understood not to go on a blue streak about anything he and Bellows might disagree on, no matter what the circumstances. And it was nice to know (having heard that speech a thousand times in my 27 years), that I'm not the only one to assure my liaison that won't happen, only to end dinner with everyone staring at their plates, compulsively crumpling whatever happens to be in their hand, knowing the evening has absolutely no chance of being salvaged.

Out of the three, I think Amis is the one I enjoy reading the least. But that's a very different from the fact that I think he's the one I wrestle with the most. I've yet to be able to put my finger on why. He appeals to a part of me that isn't always as easy to set loose. Awhile ago, I shared an anecdote about this guy who ran the local venue in my hometown and was subsequently bombarded with so much ridicule, I just kind of shrugged it off and assumed no one got it. Like, "What can you do?" sort of thing. The anecdote in question was about a guy from my hometown who ran a blind pig punk rock venue. Sometime in the late 80's, he had thrown Kurt Cobain out of the venue and onto the street. The man had countless stories about rock musicians before they were famous, and he was always candid about them in a way that only people who fundamentally don't give a fuck are. (Several years ago, I had to phone Electrical Audio - run by Steve Albini, one of the few "Thinking People" in rock music - and when I told them where I was from, the first thing they said was, "Really? Is the Ice Pick still open!?!?") I had heard the story second-hand, and when I tried to coax him into telling the it, he interrupted me and went off on one of his long-winded diatribes about how he didn't care how famous the guy was. He never actually told the story, which was a good thing. Because I was able to walk away from it with a valuable lesson: "No one of any integrity would expect or demand reverence in the absence of respect."

Mark had a lot of cool stories. But there's one other anecdote from my adolescence that immediately comes to mind whenever I think about Mark. In a way, it haunts me. When Mark was younger, he had toured with GG Allin's band. For anyone who isn't familiar with GG, he was probably the most degenerate rock musician to ever live. He would cut himself, pull audience members on stage and forcefully and without consent, perform cunnilingus on them. He'd defecate all over the stage and then throw it at members of the audience or rub it in their face. GG Allin was an awful, disgusting, monstrous individual. His plan was to do his last show on a Halloween of some year or another. His intention was to have a revolver that he'd use to shoot 5 people in the audience, and then use the last bullet on himself. The plan was never realized because he was in jail on Halloween and got dead before the next one came around. This was a very intense, deeply disturbed individual.

Now, during their days as a band, GG lived with Mark in Muskegon. He's an older man, my father's age. If one were to believe the stories, he is by any societies' standards, a degenerate. But for whatever reason, his degenerate side was something I was never exposed to. This being the first time I've really thought about it like this, bottom line is that he was always kind and polite and level-headed about everything. I'll never really understand why I wasn't exposed to his dark side (it never felt like he was trying to hide anything), but if I hadn't heard the stories, I'd never have any reason to wonder if it was there. He never put me in harm's way, he never took advantage of me (he let me have a place to play whatever I wanted at whatever volume I wanted, I made him money, he gave me and everyone else he's ever dealt with their fair share), and as I got older and started to experiment with certain things, he was supportive without being overly-so and without trying to drag me into the seedier side of things. He never offered me anything I didn't ask for and in all the years I've known him, he never raised his voice at me other than to grumble about being a prima donna for needing to go home and get my tremolo bar after soundcheck. And he treated all of my friends with the same respect.

Anyway, rumor had it that when he was playing drums for Allin, they used to go over to the home of an acquaintance's sister and ask if they could give her baby a bath. Now, maybe they were just joking. Or maybe Mark wasn't involved and it was GG and one of the other guys in the band. But on hearing this story (which simultaneously shocked me, broke my heart, and filled me with literal terror), I also vividly remember the day my mother explained to me that women weren't the only potential targets of rape. She later regretted answering my inevitable queries about how it was physiologically possible due to the fact that I sobbed and sobbed for hours.

Why did I sob and sob for hours and why was I simultaneously shocked, heart-broken, and filled with literal terror when hearing about Mark and GG asking if they could bathe someone else's baby? Well, I don't really want to go into it. But Amis... He addresses the issue head-on. After talking about his own experience with being sexually violated as a child, he says:

"...and, secondly, with these supererogatory beatings, the younger the child the greater the danger. The younger the child... That tells me something. And so does this. When I have handled my babies I have had the wayward thought, the thought suggested by their beauty and their innocence. It feels like a sexual thought but in essence it is a violent thought. To act it out in any way would be like dashing the naked body to the bathroom floor. Paedophiles hate children because they hate innocence, and children are innocence."

That's a pretty brave passage. And it's pretty valuable insight that skips the need for technical writers and academic pretense. But, enough of that. What I like (and what I wrestle the most with) in Amis' work is that I can be working for hours recording vocals for a song about friendship and trajectories and gravity, and I can get frustrated and worn out, pick up Experience, open it to a random page, and find myself reading about those exact things. Whether the relationship between Kingsley Amis and Phillip Larkin or Hitchens and (Martin) Amis, or Martin and Kingsley Amis, he can always be trusted to give insight into things that our culture seems too reactionary, too violent, too ashamed of itself, too proud of itself, and too downright afraid to examine right now.

And finally, I think I ended up taking more of an interest in the life and behavior of Kingsley Amis than Martin. Maybe it had something to do with Kingsley Amis being the product of an environment that came long before an era of video games and television and myface. Regardless, some of the stuff about Kingsley is flat-out hilarious. He cheated on his wife, so his wife took the kids to Spain for a year abroad. While that doesn't seem so bad (Kingsley was a celebrated English writer and traveled to "The Continent" often), to visit his children, he would have had to either overcome several overwhelming, debilitating, and seemingly irrational fears (the man didn't drive, the man didn't fly, the man was afraid to make his own travel arrangements, was afraid to travel alone, etc.) or he would have had to have his mistress escort him to his estranged wife's doorstep.

Which at the end of the day (like anything else I mentioned above that doesn't involve unspeakable degeneracy) is really funny. Show me a women that won't pull something like that and I'll show you a woman that doesn't have any use for or interest in people like myself. Which brings me to The War Against Cliché. I already said why I feel kind of lost in our society. For instance, it easy to feel something closely related to longing while reading about Martin Amis playing Scrabble or "verb games" with his friends on a Friday evening, and when he'd talk about Kingsley, it was comforting to see language and mores and symbols pop up that are readily available in the company of my grandmother. but I hardly think it would behoove society to outlaw and steamroll X-Box and Dintendo or to stop using e-mail and the AOL Talker. I don't really know why our culture is so high-strung these days. Whether genuine or contrived (contrived almost invariably starting out as genuine, only becoming contrived when the need to save face and give the impression of "Everything you know, I knew yesterday" arises), that sort of reactionary behavior has nothing to do with me or anything I'm saying. Sometimes I have answers and sometimes I don't. When I don't, I find ways to bounce ideas off people or institutions I trust (or, trust to behave a certain way or have a certain motive) and see what comes out the other side. And often times, I find it's important to be able to laugh about things and not take oneself too seriously. And The War Against Cliché has been great for laughs. It's been really interesting and insightful in all the ways described above. Not to mention the fact that - like Graham Greene and a couple other uber-prolific British writers - I spent a good period of my life attempting to devour the works of Anthony Burgess. All those years, and only last week did I learn that Burgess was as prolific composer as he was an author.

But like Money (and Experience, and London Fields), a special nod needs to go out to the ability Amis has to make me laugh.

(From a review of The Essential Mailer, published in The Observer, August 1982):

"When running for mayor of New York in the late Sixties (on a platform resembling a gallows, or a stocks), Mailer contended that 'literary men... would know how to talk to the people - they would be forced to govern by the fine art of the voice'. On the next page, we are offered one of Mailer's mayoralty speeches, an example of the lulling accents of suasion:

You're not my friend if you interrupt me when I am talking 'cause it just breaks in the mood in my mind. So fuck you, too. All right, I said you're all a bunch of spoiled kids ... I'll tell you that, I'll tell you that. You've been sittin' around jerkin' off, havin' your jokes for twenty-two years. Yeah!

And he still can't understand why he came nowhere in the race.

(in the same paragraph)

In a Playboy interview featured here, Mailer is invited to give his views on God:

I can see Him as someone who is like other men except more noble, more tortured, more desirous of a good that He wishes to receive and give to others - a tortuous ethical activity at which He may fail.

Now wait a minute: doesn't He remind you of somebody?"

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-If one were to triangulate the 2nd paragraph from the 2nd chapter ("Personal Trajectory") of Douglas Feith's War and Decision (.pdf) with this and this, one might better understand why I think it's important to enter into heated talks with rhetoric, even if we live in a nation with a strict policy of not negotiating with deviants.

-Those articles (and Feith's book) are also really fucking good, whether you care about rhetoric or not. I need to re-read the Hitchens piece to really get the gist of it, but what he's addressing is that easy-out that's become so en-vogue in certain circles. That particular rhetroic ("the US should concentrate on Afghanistan instead of Iraq") is way too prevalent for people to not be questioning it or discussing it more openly. It's often passed off as a middle ground between anti-war rhetoric and WMD/"God told me to wage this war" crap, when in reality it just puts the situation in an even more complicated light with a seemingly simple solution. If I'm elected president, I promise to make sure that all the police officers in this nation will cease to carry firearms and instead will carry water pistols loaded with Free Beer."

-This Kamiya guy has been consistently good since the day I started paying attention to who's name was at the top of which article. (List of Kamiya texts.) The editors-choice letters pertaining to the article linked above are also pretty good.

-mp3 of Betancourt reporting I mentioned last week.

-I think Broadsheet or Jezebel should hire Hitchens to do a monthly piece called "No, For Real - I Asked Fran Liebowitz..."

-I've spooned a Marine (a very long time ago - he had really nice skin), but I've never been water boarded at a gay rave. Nice. It seems like there's a trend developing over there. If Sir Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Hitchens ever find themselves having a post-midlife crisis, Vanity Fair should commission them to buy a bag of p0+ and a six pack of cheap beer, go do this (they could even sing the song), and then live-blog their experience with the misdemeanor court system.

-That's (obviously) more than enough of that. I'm exhausted. I've been chipping away at the casino-thing since the week I moved up here and was finally able to gather some source material. (My place of employment has a cache of Edirol R09s.)

CCTV
Detroit, MI
July 10, 2008
12.17pm

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:28:27 GMT

They'll probably fix it, but there's some really great stuff going on with some of the translations related to the Bettencourt Incident. This is my favorite thus far. After awhile, the voice starts to separate. Sounds like Steve Reich on a Klonopin bender.

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:25:16 GMT

centrifugalspokesoflight
(spoken word by Walt Whitman)
Audio (.mp3)
Video (.wmv)

Sites Used In Video:
City of Detroit, MI
City of Hamtramck, MI
City of Ann Arbor, MI
City of Livonia, MI
Heidleberg Project (Detroit, MI)
Wayne County International Airport (Wayne, MI)
Union Depot (Detroit, MI)
Hart Plaza (Detroit, MI)
Greektown Casino (Detroit, MI)
Motor City Casino (Detroit, MI)
Three Roods Farm (Flint, MI)
Lager House (Detroit, MI)
Ambassador Bridge (Detroit, MI)
Painted Lady Lounge (Hamtramck, MI)

(Audio Performed and Programmed In Detroit/Hamtramck, MI June 27, 2008-July 1, 2008)

Women + Child
Hamtramck, MI
June 24, 2008
9.14pm

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:14:16 GMT

-Letter to the editors of Slate. (In reference to this.)

-From the Really Cool Things People Say Sometimes department: "My specialty is .pdfs."

-Free ~~beer~~ pdf.

-Salon on noise pollution.

Etc.
Detroit, MI
June 23, 2008
10.57pm

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 01:45:03 GMT

I mentioned I've been having some things repaired and switching things around and all of that. Basic tone issues aside, I'm also thinking about the fact that I'll probably start playing out again and that I'd like to start mixing outside the box. Since the whole affair is so tech-oriented, trying to kill those two birds with one stone can feel like the financial equivalent of making sure the De Lorean drives under the cables on November 12, 1955 at exactly 10.04pm and at exactly 88mph.

One thing I came to realize last week is that no bereft-of-self-respect producer/engineer/etc. would try to do an outside-the-box mix (routing the audio through a console as opposed to using a software mixer - "in the box" = inside the computer) without that much-sought-after and highly-coveted 90's Prosumer Digital sound.

While you're wiping the sarcasm off your monitor, Behringer is a German company specializing in prosumer audio products. They've built themselves a reputation of trying to put too much into too small a package for too low a price. But at one point (many theorize it was prior to putting the term "Pro" after the model name - VirtualizerPro, ComposerPro, etc. - I've owned one or two of their more recent products and would have to agree), they made stuff that was pretty cool for what it was.

For instance, in the case of the Behringer Virtualizer, it's kinda dark, hashy reverbs and just-murky-enough delays that they don't seem to intrude on that critical spot towards the top of the 20hz-20khz spectrum (say, 5-9khz - those "air" frequencies). I'm not really a fan of the modulations, but there's something about the reverb and delay algorithms that always worked. They're just trashy enough to sound musical. It might also be said that the reverbs sound more like a special-effect than simulation of a room or a space. It wasn't uncommon for people to come up to me after a spectacle circa 1999 and say, "So, what's that thing that makes your guitar sound like it's not a guitar?"

I've had my Behringer Virtualizer since I was 17 years old. I've owned some high-end pieces that couldn't take the beating this thing has. But it started having some critical issues (unpredictable data knob, missing rack ear, etc.) a couple years ago that made it too unreliable and I decided to put it on the shelf and replace it with a Lexicon unit. But while talking to a friend this weekend, a light-bulb kind of went off over my head. I went into my spare bedroom, dug it out, plugged it in, and was happy to find that unreliabilities aside (I doubt I'd use it to play out), it sounds just like it always did. Which is a polite way of saying it still sounds like shit.

asleep (mp3)
1min, 25sec.
Recorded 1998 at 3358 Studios, Muskegon, MI, utilizing Holy Triumvirate of
Craptastic (Behringer Virtualizer, Alesis Wedge, Alesis "Blackface" ADAT)

Behringer Virtualizer
Hamtramck, MI
June 21, 2008
7.59pm

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:29:24 GMT

-I've been reading some of this Paul Berman-guy's stuff. Amongst other things, he does essays about Che Guevara that pop up in Slate every time Guevara and/or his legacy are in the spotlight. (One can only assume he'll be doing a few more in the near future.) I don't give a fuck one-way-or-the-other about Che Guevara, but he uses the subject as a template for examining other things (conflict, charisma, etc.). He doesn't come across as being very objective. I assume that's because he uses Guevara as a springboard for everything he says. (It ends up coming across as vitriol directed at Che.) And now I kinda want to know why everything about Guevara gets under his skin. This is one of those times a television would be nice. Could flip it on for a second and hear the sound of his voice and the way he carries himself to get a better idea where he's coming from. See if his lip starts to curl or his left-ear starts to twitch while he's waiting for other people to finish speaking. Like, figure out if he's the kind of guy who talks at VIPs like they're children or if he's the kind of guy who sounds like Muskegon Micah kicked TVP in his face. (blahblahblah)

It was kind of an exciting week or two for periodicals. A lot of really funny articles written by women, which doesn't seem to happen often enough. It's been like one of those times when you can go to the record store every weekend and come home with (5) new mainstream releases and every one of them is awesome. I don't know if there's ever really been a bad-era in music, but there are those times where things get really good/interesting for awhile. The last couple weeks has felt like one of them.

-Speaking of which, how come none of the mid-20's to early 30's women's crowd ever seems to mention Echobelly or Sleeper when they go on about Exile In Guyville and Brat Machine? Echobelly was The Shit. Debbie from Curve, Snowpony, and SpcEco (and if I understand correctly, kind of an icon in the London indie rock LGBTQ community) was a member for a long time. And I think the vocalist started doing the rock band-thing after running away from home because she didn't want to take part in an arranged marriage. And Louise Wener (from Sleeper) is the closest person I can think of to being Liz Phair's ideological doppleganger. I guess that after Sleeper broke up, Wener started doing some writing. (+)

-I recorded some covers this winter and there were a few that I was never able to finish. One of those is Bowery Electric's "Passages." If you've never listened to it, you should. It's really mysterious and understated and soft and sexy and sensual and grave and breathtaking and all kinds of other things. Like, it's a really Great Song and I wanted to "look under the hood" (so to speak) and see if I could make it my own. It seemed easy enough to re-arrange and program and record, but no matter what I did, I just couldn't get it to come together. Everything I did felt like I was cheapening it. It sounds silly, but I respect it almost to the point of reverence (it really is that good), so instead of forcing it or saying "that's good enough," I decided to just leave it alone.

Anyway, at one point during the process, I contacted Lawrence Chandler to find out where the spoken word sample was from (out of curiosity) and what the lyrics were (out of necessity). Aside from the fact that it bears mentioning he does some really awesome minimalist/electronic stuff (I guess he studied with Lamonte Young, which is pretty impressive), I was surprised to find out the lyrics are an adaptaption of Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." I'd never read it ("Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") and being told the lyrics were knicked only seemed to add to the depth and mystique the song already had.

Nunu
Hamtramck, MI
June 17, 2008
5.28pm

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:16:33 GMT

Highland Park, MI
June 18, 2008
3.52pm

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:51:09 GMT

Chew On It, Dilznoofus

This guy who runs a little record label I used to release stuff on told me he and his wife used to sell a book called "The Secret" through ads on the Craiglist. I guess the ad said something to the effect of "Do you want to know The Secret to happiness, success, prosperity, financial security, and The American Dream? E-mail us right now and we'll share The Secret with you!" Apparently, the demand from shut-ins and housewives far outweighed their supply of this undoubtedly fantastic text. So, the "What's The Secret?" e-mails kept rolling in long after they had books to sell and I guess they started replying to the inquiries with a circular that said something to the effect of: "The Secret is a 6'10" black man with a 12" member we keep chained up in the spare bedroom. Give us your address and we'll bring him right over."

That said, I had to go to the Social Security Administration a couple weeks ago to apply for a new card. I went early and sat in the waiting room watching the television. My feelings on television are... I don't have any feelings on television. Other than some internet programs and the occasional TV-on-DVD comp., it's fair to say I think about it a little bit less than swimming pools and a tiny bit more than getting my pilot's license. It doesn't fit my criteria for the development of a passive relationship.

On this particular morning, the TV was tuned to the "Regis and Kelly Show." (What happened to Kathy Lee?) It started out with Kelly standing under a glass ceiling that had some sort of wading pool on top of it. The wading pool had a few people diving around in a sort of part mermaid, part mime fashion. Kelly informed me I have to go see it (whatever and wherever the spectacle is installed). "IT'S BEAUTIFUL."

The program then went back to the studio, where Kelly and her co-host Doogie Howser, MD (Regis was nowhere to be found) announced they'd be cooking outside with one of the gentlemen from Days Of Our Lives. What interested me the most was that while Doogie said very little, Kelly and the Soap Opera Hunk never seemed to say anything without yelling. And they did it with all the soulless enegry, zeal, and logic of Matthew Lesko on a crystal meth binge. THISISANOLDFAMILYRECIPE! IDON'TKNOWWHYSWORDFISHCOOKEDHALIBUTTASTESSOGOOD, BUTITDOES! (To which Kelly replied: JUSTFORTHEHALIBUT! ("Just for the hell-of-it.")

Then, it cut to commercials. I'm not going to bother trying to explain my feelings on those. I listen to music made with the sound of sampled fax machines and photocopiers and I suspect the appeal is fundamentally equivalent to one's little sister's interest in Britney Spears and this Miley Cyrus person. Who am I to say that a giant talking cockroach carrying pizzas won't be enough to make someone pick up the phone and call the Orkin Man?   Still, even sober, my sensitivity to other cultures has its limits, and halfway through a commercial for Dale Sprik and Associates, I had a giggle fit like a stoner in a community college class hearing his biology instructor explain that AIDS was God's way of punishing gays for having sex with a monkey.

Afterwards, I went to Fish King to congratulate myself on a job well done (6 down, only 4 to go). I'm not sure how it happened, but one day I went in there and all the bulletin boards and windows were covered in stereotypical "Radical Black Muslim" propaganda. (Maybe he got a girlfriend or something. I have this image in my mind of him scratching his head while some woman takes it upon herself to cover his store with Farrakahn promotional material.) And next to the stack of Metro Times, there's a couple zines.

So, while the Fish King made my shrimp (and while he wasn't looking - those zines aren't free and he says the price of catfish is up), I read an article about how to prepare for and what to do when things get Really Fucking Bad. The article - including references to Whitey in the first paragraph - was very level headed and reasonable. The tone wasn't very different from a Better Homes and Gardens' piece about how to get ink stains out of a white dress using basil and the blood of a leprechaun.   It was also very long, so after a few paragraphs, I just skimmed to see if her propaganda was consistently reasonable. It was. She concluded the article with a very reasonable explanation of why it's important to understand why not only does a pet bird eat less than a pet dog, it tastes better, too.

It's sad that the world thinks we still need to justify that sort of thing. I remember the last time I had to take my Social Security card to an HR department. It was a day labor place in Kalamazoo, MI called Labor Ready. I think they had a side operation manufacturing Tramp Dread (something that there was no shortage of during that period). I also remember what was on the front cover of the Kalamazoo Gazette that day and how my mind started juxtaposing the story with the conversations going on around me. I looked up and realized I wasn't just the only white person in the room, I was the only one who didn't call New Orleans my home.

So, I did what anyone in my position would have done. I went outside, gave Deashawn $20, went home and got giggly with Bob The Persian. 5 months later, I was living in Montague, MI, learning how to edit waveforms and clean up nasty source material. Since I was learning on my own and didn't have any guidance, it was a very slow, tedious process. Rewarding, but often frustrating and exhausting. The fact that it was transferred from a cassette tape by some guy whose "friend's dad used to work for the FBI" (anyone who grew up around law enforcement knows there's always the strangest shit lying around the house) compressed to low-bit rate mp3 (even with the most pristine conversion, signal is lost and/or irrepairably damaged every time the tape is converted) only fed into the intensity of the whole affair. The source material was the Jonestown Death Tape.

I would work on it in the early morning using headphones for hours on end. Over and over and over I'd listen to Christine Miller explain to some hayseed evangelist why she shouldn't have to kill herself if she didn't want to ("Look, man, things were bad, but they weren't that bad. So what, I just traded one glorified internment camp for another. I just wanna go back to Oakland, eat cheese sandwiches, and pretend this shit never happened.") At some point, my head started to focus on the monkeys chattering in the background, hanging out in the trees way back in '68... I'd occasionally step outside to have a cigarette and since I was up in the middle of nowhere and on the shore of Lake Michigan during the notoriously harsh West Michigan winter, the only sound (no hums, no city sounds) were waves and wind and trees. It was fucked-up.

The reason I wanted to use the samples is that I Thought It Was Cool. In 1999, my 18 year old self drove across the country to see Morrissey play the Coachella Festival.   Greatest show I've ever seen. I've never heard a better (or louder) mix, the setting was insane (he came out just as the sun disappeared and it went from 115-to-a-breezy-85), and he and everyone else on staged loved the fact that they were doing what they were doing. It was easy to see there was no place in the world any of them would rather be. I sobbed almost as much as I did at my sister's wedding. (Meaning, I stopped short of webs of snot going from appendage-to-appendage like a cartoon character caught in a chewing gum dilemma.) The only "flub" in the performance was when the spoken word sample from "Teachers Are Afraid of The Pupils" was cued. It was cued about 7 times louder than it should have been. I thought it sounded awesome.

I picked the Jonestown tape as my first source for spoken words because I knew it would be awesome. So, essentially, I ended up developing a passive relationship with the source material in a similar way to the way others develop a passive relationship with television. And it fucked me up. If someone would have asked me what I wanted to be doing on June 17, 2008, I would have described what I did today. But building a life from scratch involves a lot of waiting and patience. So, rather than spending my time unwinding and forgetting about my day, I wanted to do something that I hoped would be productive ("ends justify the means," and all of that) and forget about the future I had to spend a lot of time waiting for. And what I allowed myself to become passive to had a pretty profound effect on me.   Simply digging up the transcript (linked above) was all it took to make me tear-up pretty heavily.

So, what's the point? Well, aside from dissecting some actual rhetoric ("TV Rots Your Brain," "Sounds Like Some Crazy Black Panther Shit To Me," "Drugs and Alcohol Are A Dark Demon Who Will Destroy Your Valid Forms of Government Issue ID"), I noticed some of my faux-rhetoric came full circle (again). While it's silly to think the self-absorbed little shit will even bother, if I ever have a granddaughter and she asks me who was president when I was her age, I have little doubt what I'll say:

Well, first of all, the president after him was pretty good. I don't even know if his opponent had conceded or not, but the day the Senator got back to work after clinching the democratic nomination, he walked out the door of his private jet, and... I remember seeing pictures of him standing there on the tarmac. He had this look in his eye, like he knew had big plans for America and that at the end of the day, everyone who had ever doubted him would know it, too. See, here's the thing: A lot of people I knew at the time - your Grandmother, for instance - liked him because they thought the world would turn into a giant Ann Arbor, MI - a Whole Foods on every corner, canned dignity for every undergrad Anthropology major who couldn't find a job as an Anthropologist in the Anthropology Industry... But it was so much better than that. While it wasn't the utopia everyone was hoping for, it was enough of a glimpse that... If I didn't know better, my selective memory would have put a copy of The Secret in his hands that day. It was fan-fucking-tastic.

Don't get me wrong - I liked him. And don't tell your grandmother I told you all of that - sometimes she has a hard time telling the difference between disagreement and opposition. But yeah, for my own reasons, I liked him. Quite a bit, actually. But Bush... That guy was the worst. He was like the Mike Tyson/Michael Jackson of presidents. Just, did everything wrong, said far-out shit that didn't make any sense, made up his own words... God he sucked. But anyway, he was like your grandma's new husband (what Grandpa refers to as a "Great Gay Raver"). By the time he was done, everything was so fucked up and so fucking weird, it was acceptable to make lighthearted chit-chat over dinner about how Things Would Never Go Back To The Way They Were. The whole world was acting like the corner of Eastern and Maryland Parkway on a 120 degree day in July. Everyone had just given in and said fuck-all to everything they ever held dear. I just stopped thinking about him. Something about suffering being relative told me Line-of-Sight and Foreseeable Future was ample justification for writing his existence off as inconsequential. It just wasn't worth the stress. I'd been spat on, shat on, raped and abused for 8 years. I was used to it. Fine with it, even. When things were bad, they really couldn't have gotten much worse. But when things were good... It was like being Magnum PI without the Ferrari or the grueling detective work or the stupid mustache. Oh, you've never seen Magnum PI? That's okay, sweetie, I haven't either. Anyway, right when I reached the point where he was about as important to me as the sound of a siren 3 blocks away on an a Friday night in June, that guy did the strangest thing. And it's the one thing I'll always remember him for.

He gave me $300.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From The "Life Don't Get Stranger Than This, But It Is What It Is" Department...

-Speaking of Montague, MI, I'm not sure which is more bizarre: The fact that Rothbury was mentioned on vanityfair.com or what it was mentioned for. That's the best line-up to come to Muskegon since Great White played a benefit at Rush St. to get money for all those people they killed.

-Speaking of Rush St., I finally ventured out to City Club and wasn't at all surprised to run into that Samoan-guy (Tah-Kee)

-I've been reading Eric Tamm's Brian Eno: His Music and The Vertical Color of Sound. It's his doctoral thesis from UC-Berkeley. It's also awesome. If you resent paying for things as much as I do, someone has it in .pdf here.

-An update to the Misanthropes Guide to Fine Dining: Apparently, when asked by her adolescent son what "'sophisticated' really means," the great Ann Arbor, MI restaurateur Hilary Bardwell replied with a single word: "Corrupt." Remember that the next time you're eating at Seva. As great as the atmosphere is, all the Ulrich Schnauss in the world can't hide the fact that the secret ingredient in their North African couscous is sawdust. Like I've said before: I learn the hard way so you don't have to.

To quote Chuck Nelson: I'm fine with that. I don't have any self-respect.

xoxo
-Mike

Waiting On "Waitin' On The M.E."
Hamtramck, MI
April 18, 2008
10.40pm

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 02:34:50 GMT

"My Boy, He Lives Right Over There In Those Projects"

Hitchens did an interesting piece last week. If it isn't obvious, the reason I like the stuff he writes is that he's one of the few pundits (if not the only pundit) where I read his work and walk away with something to think about. It seems like there are two kinds of standout people in the world: The absurd and people who - in some way, shape, or form - highlight how absurd everything is. Like, Michael Jackson is absurd and Dave Chappelle highlights it. Bryan Ferry tends to be kinda absurd and Brian Eno seems to spend most of his time and energy highlighting it. Rush Limbaugh is absurd, Christopher Hitchens uses a similar pool of information in a similar field to highlight it.

So, my first reaction to last week's Fighting Words was, Wow, that's beautiful... I know it's not Cool to create things that are beautiful and it's definitely not Cool to care about them or be affected by them. But that's dumb. I've been reading a collection of Hickey essays on the subject (of beauty) and in the introduction, he says, Rereading these essays in their present state, I detect several intransigent habits of mind which, since they are not specifically articulated in the text, should probably be acknowledged here. First, I have habitually suppressed the traditional contrariety of beauty and ugliness and of pleasure and pain in order to privilege all these extraordinary conditions over their true contrary: the banality of neutral comfort.

Which any songwriter knows is a very eloquent way of expressing the familiar notion that "the worst thing in the world is to not feel anything at all."

Oh, wait a second. I forgot to talk about Me. I know you've all been waiting to hear about Me. Over the past year, I've come to realize there's this class of people whose lives are dedicated to blogging. Like, at any and all times, you can cruise around the internet and find people making $30k+/year blogging and like, they sometimes spend their entire day fighting and writing smear pieces about each other (It even ends up on the cover of the New York Times magazine. That's fucked up.) And I think it's considered really tasteless to Talk About Yourself.

I've been working mornings at a university archiving the foreign language department's tape library. (Little known Mike fact: I'd rather get up at 5.30am than 5.30pm.) I've also been revamping my studio. I want to do one more phase of recording prior to mixing an album and I wanted to swap out the core of my tone and get some of my hardware repaired. Instead of doing it slowly over the course of time, I just decided to do it all at once.

The reason I'm swapping out the "core" of my tone is I've really gotten into building my own effects in various ways and aside from using Max/MSP here and there, I've become interested in the possibility of buildings effects from the ground up while multitracking. A lot of bands that work in the genres I work in will say, "It sounds like there's a lot of overdubs/layering, but really there's just one part with a bunch of effects." But I haven't heard many of them say, "It sounds like there's a bunch of effects, but really there's just a lot of calculated overdubs/layering."

For instance, if one records a clean, unaffected lead line/arpeggiation on a really cold day, turns the heat down, lets the guitar sit for a few hours, and then plays the part again in a rhythmically precise manner, one should be able to place the two tracks at the same place in the stereo field and get a sound not dissimilar to that imparted by running the original signal through a Boss Dimension-C/Roland Dimension-D. The minute delay from the subtle variations imparted by being human, plus the slight detuning resulting from the wood of the guitar expanding and contracting due to temperature change ends up giving a very spacious and organic chorus effect. If you want it to be a little more extreme, you do (3) takes. Maybe even play the third one a tiny bit sloppier.

Or, one can just buy one of the aforementioned units. Either way, it's the same (geee-ky). Sometimes, the local liquor store can't sell its top shelf scotch (because they make all their money off of King Cobra and Rocket Fuel)so they just clearance it out one bottle at a time to That Guy With The Dog. Sometimes some kid at the gas station asks you to buy him (2) grape cigarellos and one can't help but say, Okay, but you gotta return the favor. Quid pro quo, young man. Dealing with any of these topics, I can't help but think about the episode of Lost where Sawyer reveals he took the gun off the federal marshal and Kate gets pissed and says, "How do you know he was a federal marshal?" and he gets exasperated and says, Cause he had a clip-on badge. I took that, too. Thought it was Cool.

Anyway, back to Hitchens. His piece in Slate last week was one of my favorites. I already said what my initial response was. But on reading some of the comments, the article became food for thought. There's an Ivory Tower notion that suggests laughter is the sound of confusion when two perspectives and/or notions come together and conflict somehow-or-another, and some of those comments made me laugh out loud. (This one was especially good - "I am so old. Thank you.")

At the end of the day, like any good piece of polemics should, Hitchens' article made me nestle comfortably into an idea I've been tossing around for awhile that doesn't have much to do with the actual content of the piece. That idea being there are people in this world who are driven to fight. They thrive on conflict. And I think there's a tendency to put people like Mandela (and others like him, Martin Luther King Jr. is another good example) on a pedestal, and assume they're driven by some sort of inherent goodness and purity. But I think people like that make their own big hearts. They only feel alive when they're fighting, so they learn to not get caught up in the crap and how to channel that energy towards The Good Fight. That's more difficult than the previous sentence lets on. It might be said Mike Tyson is absurd and Mahatma Gandhi highlights The Absurdity.

So, whether drugs or sex or attention, there are all kinds of addictions that drive people and one can learn how to use those things to do something brilliant and useful, or one can simply let go and do something destructive and wasteful. And I've met enough gruff old men with big calloused hands who earned every penny they ever spent and didn't know how to do anything but work to know that age doesn't take that drive away, it just creates a sort of helpless feeling that's anything but healthy.

Anyway, being driven to pursue something so passionately probably directly ties into why so many of the aforementioned individuals (those who remind us how absurd the world is) have substance problems (won't even try to give examples, too many), end up in the psych ward (Chappelle, Jaco Pastorius, Dusty Springfield), or have sordid sex lives (Martin Luther King, Jr.). So, assuming all that's true, Mandela would be one of those people who resents the fact that he's "very, very old."

Hmph. Typing this out, I kind of had one more idea. There's a lot of rhetoric and vitriol in the comments on that article. With every day that goes by, it becomes harder and harder to sift through them and find the Good Stuff (Mandela's actual age and the suggestion that he started out in the Brothers and Sisters crowd were two things I wasn't previously aware of). But I know I won't ridicule or mock another person to feel good about myself or to have power over them. I won't do it out of malice. But if I respect someone and what they do, I'll poke 'em in the ribs. So, maybe if I'm right about some of the things I've noticed, the real issue is if Hitchens is in a position to be doing so to Mandela. If that were the case, one can only assume that the only people who matter in passing judgment on such a scenario would be Hitchens and Mandela. Still, it's interesting to think about.

So, bizarre and interesting little piece. If you want to check it out and haven't already, it's here.

--------------------------------------------

In Other News...

-A fair answer to "What's the one thing the world needs most right now?" is "Yet another version of Spacemen 3/Spiritualized's 'So Hot'/'(Wash Away) All Of My Tears'."

-For those who haven't seen it before, this is The Shit.

-Detroit Symphony Orchestra is sponsoring a performance of Different Trains on June 17 and Cage's "Weather" (with spoken word of Thoreau texts) on the 19th. Info here.

-I made a video for youaremysunshine. (link to download below). 90% of it is stuff I haven't used in the past. I've been compiling animations. 40 minutes of animation is about 28k pictures. I think I have about 20 minutes right now.

There are only a few people reading that would understand why I think this is so funny, but for the sign at the very end, I had to ask Ron Perlman to move out of the way. A fair answer to "If you could go back and do it all over again, what - if anything - would you do differently?" would be that I'd ask him for his honest opinion on the development of a Pigman. No man, for real. I wanna know...

(Hope all is well with everyone.)

youaremysunshine [annis mix] (link)
.wmv
~89mb

Skyline
Grand Rapids, MI
March 23, 2008
7.02pm

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 03:08:21 GMT

Nunu
Hamtramck, MI
June 7, 2008
11pm