5/26/03

I gaze out through eyes, listen through ears, move and breathe and taste and touch and sweat within this meat machinery, seemingly some glob of awareness suspended somewhere in the darkness behind my face. I'd turn around and look at me, but my eyes don't work that way. How did I get in here?

It's a question as old as language and legend and written records, and it might well predate even them. And it's probably just an illusion, a side effect of massive self-programming parallel processing. There's no proof or evidence of any separate spirit or spook, real location and composition unknown, somehow uniquely tuned to the channel of a human brain and personality. But it sure feels real.

And real or not, I'm stuck with it. For the duration of my occupancy, I live in solitary confinement in my head and squint at life through the twin windows of my sight. I move thorough the exterior world, confident that it exists and is consistent although there's no proof, no physical evidence that I can import into my private cell to demonstrate that anything out there is more than smoke and mirrors, cgi and Hollywood mansions.

My awareness came upon me suddenly, as though someone turned on a light and there I was. I was three years old, it was dark outside and a kindly woman was getting me up and dressed because our family was going to get on an airplane and fly away to someplace far away called San Diego. Then we drove out to a big flat place with lots of airplanes and my mother and brothers and sister and I all went out to get on one. And I suddenly realized that I was going to leave everything and everyone I knew behind. I threw a hysterical fit and had to be dragged onto the plane. And there I was, in the plane, in my head, looking around, absorbing my new condition -- a freshly screwed-in bulb in the infancy of its working lifetime.

Along the road, I've received occasional instruction in the subtler details of my condition. A Unitarian Sunday school teacher -- and Unitarian Sunday school is to the regular variety as Doom is to parcheesi -- once led our almost-teenage group in a leetle guided meditation (actually, back then they still called it a lesson) that went like this: here is where you're observing from, there is what you observe. Look out at the physical world, the realm of the senses. Is it here or there? Now close your eyes. Is the darkness behind your eyelids here or there? Bring up a memory, say of an elephant. Is the memory here or there? All the interior furniture of your personality, love, fear, math ability, jangling leftover melodies -- here or there? All of it, of course, is there -- and the only thing here is the Wha doing the Observing. Find God in five minutes with Mister Waterbury's handy dandy Zen Deconstruction Kit. Now go home and watch TV. Good ol' Unitarians.

It's a regrettable necessity that solipsism is the base state of all philosophy. Cogito ergo Sum doesn't mean "I think therefore I am," it means "If somebody's actually asking this stupid question, they have to be here to ask it." The Observer is a given, all else is vanity. If I am willing to accept the reality of anything else, I'm free to speculate on the possibility of other Observers, riding around in other heads. But I have no assurance that anybody else is really out there. Maybe it really is all me, baby.

Still, the same kind of inductive logic that leads us to the idea that there are alien intelligences on other planets -- it happened here, dint it? -- draws the same conclusion for other Observers. And therein lies the unkindest rub of all, one that I came across very early in my obsessions with this subject and immediately did my best to ignore.

Because, again -- how did I get in here?

If the Observer isn't part and parcel with the mind, the brain, the body, the world, somehow it inserted itself into all that from Valhalla or Heb'in or Lalaland or whereever it comes from. So somehow there's an installation process for souls on tap and this way lies Theosophy or its ten thousand creepy siblings and don't go there girlfriend. Even so. If the soul isn't part of the body, then after the body/mind/personality craps out, the soul goes on to the next handy vessel, and this way lies reincarnation and it's been done so back off mac you're foggin the lenses. And even so again.

Time, as we all know, is just another dimension. And the soul (in this reduced version) retains nothing from a previous life -- sorry, all you retreads of Jesus and King Arthur and Merlin and Santy Claus, that's all meat stuff, it goes into the ground with the stiff -- so it might just as easily go backwards as forwards. Drop a single observer into the pinball machine of human existence and it's easy to conclude that the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker and everyone else who ever lived are all the same guy. I am he as you are he as you are me and sing along, everybody! Just as in quantum mechanics, every electron is the same electron, so every person you meet is/was/will be yourself.

Like I said, I didn't like this conclusion at all at all, no, precious. There's a powerful lotta folks around here that I sure don't want to be stuck as next time around. Not that I'll ever know it.

But it really puts a fresh spin on that old saw about loving your neighbor as yourself, dunnit?

5/19/03

Case in point: the Dixie Chicks and their criticism of the (then pending) war in Iraq. One minute they're the hottest band in country music, SRO shows, screaming fans, #1 singles. Every mother's dream. Then, one little remark about Georgie Porgie and blammo! it's spit to the face, monster trucks to the CD's and bitchslappings on top 40 C&W stations from Hell to Knoxville (a somewhat shorter distance than it would at first appear). And right behind, the Handwringer Brigade, out to make hay and steam up their rimlesses with pious references to the first amendment and other sacred texts.

Well, fine. Anything to sell records, I always say -- and for every Chick CD recycled beneath the heel of a self-righteous Tony Lama it's a sucker bet that five more went out the door at Tower. Certainly there was no particularly bravery exhibited, considering the craven apologies streaming like butterfly kisses from the beleaguered ladies' camp in subsequent days.

You can't look at the Dixie Chick controversy in isolation -- it's symptomatic of all the compromises and subtle oppressions endemic to Das Kapitalism, especially in the recording industry. When people enter into deals with the Devil, they shouldn't be too surprised to get a taste of the pitchfork every now and again. The Chicks are a wildly successful act that went from playing on streetcorners for chump change to sold-out arenas with seemingly little more than a hop, skip and a makeover. But everything comes at a price, especially money. While the mundane infernal beings of the corporate world don't require you to sign in blood or pony up your immortal soul, they do fit you for a goodly-sized ball 'n' chain, and that burden extends farther than just manager's points or debits against advances.

Which is not to say that the Chicks don't have freedom of speech -- far from it. They're certainly free to speak their hearts wherever they like. Equally, the radio stations that play their records and crank the big bucks for the industry that bears them up like Venus on the half-shell are free to dump them right off their playlists if their commerciality starts to falter. And ain't nothing like pissing your customers off to blow the sale. Ask any telemarketer.

If it's true that the better connected you get, the less free your speech becomes, it speaks volumes about the adversarial position marketeering holds to culture. It might even be said that capitalism exists entirely as a parasite on the the cultural body, a leech drawing zero-sum nourishment from the aggregation of humans into social groups with rules and presumptions about behavior. Certainly there has always been a insect-revulsion towards profiteers displayed by a goodly percentage of the populace, summed up in the old saying, "There are two kinds of people in the world, the ones that take and the ones that give. The ones that take eat better, and the ones that give sleep better."

That would imply that Marx's sour prediction of capitalism inevitable collapse has more credence than most modern historians are willing to give it, albeit from a social rather than economic point of view. Commerce is only a stepchild of culture, of communitarian impulses older than money or trade or industry or even agriculture. Say it loud and say it proud: humans are a social animal. We don't survive solo. Defense of the group is defense of the self. Taking brute advantage of cooperative impulses for personal gain is a short-term, at best single-generation strategy. When everyone starts taking advantage, humanity dies and beasts plunder the remains. Paradoxically, the most humane members of the group are the ones that suffer and struggle the hardest in such a scenario. It makes the Tragedy of the Commons look like a cheap soap opera.

The advantage the transgressor of the social contract gets is the opportunity to provide his (okay, or her) offspring with whatever advantages money will buy. It makes perfect sense from the individual, momentary viewpoint Ol' Stickyfingers goes with. The whole effect may well be just a glitch in our firmware, setting the needs of the Dawkinian selfish gene against those of the Darwinian group. In lesser species this leads to patriarchal silverbacks killing the cubs of other males to ensure the dominance of their own line or the schizoid power struggles among male wolves, aggression and passivity flipflopping in the underlings. Perhaps in our case it leads to more symbolic gestures like robber-baronism or bulldozing Dixie Chicks CD's.

The implication is that we haven't yet adapted to the disruptive power of money. Like fire, it's a fine servant and a terrible master, but unlike fire, it takes slaves with far greater ferocity. And it showed up so recently and so suddenly that our germ plasm is still reeling on the ropes and hoping for the bell. Our only hope is either to mutate, and quick, to the point where moolah is no longer Dad, or to rewire our society's structure to protect the group from the marauding greenbacks.

In this corner, weighing in at 800 pounds -- the Gorilla! and in this corner, weighing in at gawd knows what -- The Superman! Or is it Socialism? Listen to that crowd roar! But first, these messages.

5/12/03

If there's anything that brings folks together, it's mothers and food. And yesterday was Mother's Day at the Country Kitchen Buffet.

The establishment in question is an all-you-can-eat affair, but about as far from the bits-and bites of smorgasbord as you can get. This place is founded on the principle of stuffing your everloving gullet, and then stuffing it some more. The food is bland but comforting midwest farm fare, as the name would imply, the kind grandma fed your grandma. The emphasis is on starches and meat, though the salad bar is plentiful if not especially imaginative.

S and I are partial to occasional overeating. We've gutted one-plate salad bars, carefully extending the edges of the pipsqueak bowls provided with cucumber rounds to pile more on. We've torn into dim sum to the point of falling asleep at traffic lights afterwards. We've made meals of complimentary happy-hour food, ignoring the bartender's glare. We've shelled nations of shrimp at seafood specials with other bargain gobblers while I intoned in my best Unctuous Nature Channel Voice, "Schools of great whales churn the frigid waters of the Arctic seas, feeding on the great shoals of krill..." But this joint is in a class by itself. It's an all-ages rock concert for taste buds, with the rest of the body dragged along behind as pure ornamentation.

The decor is hardly imposing, sort of a Denny's Retro look with a dash of school cafeteria. Framed Norman Rockwell covers line the walls: doctor examining dolly, boys in flight from the No Swimming hole, kid with pup at the vet with a roomful of lookalike pets and owners, zookeeper reading the paper while the lion attempts to squeeze through the bars to get to his sandwich. And right up at the front, the most apropos of all: the More Anglo Than Thou Thanksgiving cover with two or three generations salivating around the table while Granny brings out the turkey, the whole ensemble titled Freedom From Want.

And that's exactly what the joint was about yesterday. Perhaps the most endearing feature of the place is the diversity of its clientele, which puts its food to shame. Young and old, rich and poor, every available race, culture, creed and familial arrangement that could afford $8.98 a plate was in the door and raking through the fried chicken and mashed potatos. It was like celebrating Mom's Day with the family -- the human family.

On other occasions, I've looked around the room and seen a drama in every booth: the young couple on a cheap date, the old man dining alone with the ghost of his wife across the table, the working class family out for some quality time but settling for quantity instead, the zepplin -class chairsplitters hauling their painful addiction back for fourths, the single woman indulging in a pathetic treat at the end of a long lonely week. Trite little existential stories with the sole distinction of being true. This time, though, everything was about the Joy of Eating. Customers smiled through full mouths and distended lips, children were strangely polite and cheerful, and even the babies didn't cry. The organized chaos of the serving lines rang with cheerful greetings, the tinkle of silverware and the growling of stomachs. It was, as S dryly observed, a veritable feeding frenzy.

It's both exhilarating and appalling to even witness such conspicuous consumption, let alone participate in it. Dull or not, the sheer plenitude of the chow shorts out any other considerations except purely logistic (I can have more of that excellent stuffing only if I'm limiting myself to only two desserts, and only a small portion of each...). Despite the one-price-fits-all cost, budgeting is still a necessary part of the process, if only to prevent a ruptured esophagus. And with every mouthful comes the realization of the overwhelming abundance of our part of the world, without any attendant rationalization or excuse except "Sure is good!" Whatever hidden crimes may be responsible for the presence of such unmitigated wealth are buried, along with the attendant guilt, under the anesthetizing load of yummies.

But between mouthfuls, I found myself in the throes of prayer. Thank you for this food, and for the understanding that there's plenty more where it came from. I praise the abundance of this beautiful world. Please help me grow into the kind of person who deserves access to a feast the mere sight of which would cause heart arrest in half the world's population. Help me to accept this bounty without reservation or fear. And please give me the grace and wisdom not to do this more than my digestive system or body fat ratio can tolerate. Amen. Burp.

A prayer addressed to -- who else? -- Mother. It was, after all, Her day.

5/5/03

This tenancy works its way into many of my pursuits. In music, I frequently only learn enough about an instrument to play a necessary part on a multitracked piece, sometimes even using whatever crutch is at hand (hard to play in B? Slow down the recorder and play in Bb). In auto mechanics, I'll do whatever is necessary to keep wheels between me and the road, and not a blessed thing more.

Naturally, computers represent a fertile ground for lowbrow tech. With all the orphaned platforms whining in thriftstores or up on the block on Ebay, it's a buyer's market. And even better, most bits and pieces can be researched on the good ol' Internet. Sure, you have to be your own tech support line, but hey -- usually you are anyways, right?

A couple years ago I got a notion to try desktop video on my vaguely mastodonian then-Mac, a jacked-up 8100/80 whose reign of honor crested somewhere in the first Clinton administration. It had evaded the executioner's ax through the fortunate happenstance of having been purchased by moi at a neighborhood yard sale. Some investigations on line landed me a Radius Spigot Pro nubus card. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't quite reconcile its physical geometry with my fossil's internal organs, but for some reason I kept it. Prophetically so, as it turned out.

During the summer I acquired a Quadra 840 AV in a thrift store for 20 bucks, sort of like finding a ruby in a bag of M&M's. It was a small salve to my ego after having earlier achieved lifetime membership in the One That Got Away Club by not destroying my bank account to grab a slightly battered hurdy gurdy in the Sav n Pac that practically begged me to take it home for $20 I didn't happen to have at the time. I bought the AV as a replacement for my previous second computer, formerly my first, to burn CD's. It was only several months later that I realized it would also accept the Radius card. In installing the card and its software, I discovered the (infamous to the initiate) warning that this card wasn't supported on Power PC's, and that the drivers were only stable on (drumroll, please) an 840 AV!

Using this accidental setup plus some obsolete recording and editing software I got for free, I've since produced a very nice demo quality mixdown of some VHS recordings of Amber Tide, complete with fades and titles and logos and all the stuff you'd expect to find on a well-produced tape. And along with all my other bargain basement multimedia services, I can now offer video editing as well. Not bad for an investment of under $200.

Another example: I first got into digital recording with the acquisition of a used blackface ADAT, the 8-track that conquered the basements, garages and back bedrooms of the DIY recording world and never looked back. It kicked ass on my old Tascam 38, both soundwise and in freedom from excess maintenance. It also didn't hurt that you could buy tape for it in the AV section at K-Mart. Soon enough, though, I found the means to start multitracking on my computer, and the ADAT was reduced to a rack ornament. It was just easier to drop tracks directly to the hard disk and edit regions instead of painfully punching in over rough spots and plotting to not overrun the 8 part limit.

But computer audio had a limitation of its own: the high cost of anything but stereo input. For the vast majority of the projects I did, two tracks in was fine. But every now and again I'd need to record a drummer or a choir or some larger group, or I'd want to do a remote session, and the ADAT once again came into play, after which I'd painstakingly drop the session into the computer like Noah at the ark, two by two by two by two.

I managed to redeem both the computer and the ADAT in one fell swoop by purchasing (for dry unsalted peanuts) a post-support Korg 1212 PCI audio card, which gave me the vainglorious ability, not only to directly input ADAT sessions 8 tracks at a time, but to record up to 12 live tracks at once directly to computer as well -- a capacity usually obtained at about ten times what I paid, if you don't count ol' blackface. The live path is circuitous -- mike to mixing board to ADAT (in record ready mode) to digital output to 1212 input to computer -- but the price is definitely right. And while all the stuff is like, so 20th century, it works great and the results are CD quality.

Some of my more industry-savvy friends have commented how the installed base of computer equipment acts as competition for all the neato new stuff coming out. There's so much throwaway consumer electronics cluttering up the bargain bins of the world that it's a wonder that anything new gets sold at all. This stuff gets obsoleted fractions of MTBF's before it breaks. And that's good news for lowbrow techs like me. It means we get unlimited access to Yesterday's Technology Today, at prices too low to quote but not to gloat over.

It might well be a measure of the maturity of an industry when the old stuff, be it Model T's, DC-3's or Word 6, is seen as being as useful as the latest and the greatest. Like I've said before (and better men before me), the real competition for OS X isn't Windows, it's System 9, or 8, or even 7. When the population of leftovers vastly outnumbers the hyped and shiney new and cool, the pressure becomes ever greater to actually put out something that's more than just more of the same.

And it's guys like me that actually apply that pressure. Just think of me as an evolutionary force for good on the hoof. I also accept checks.