9/30/02

Ah, it's Madam Zuzu, seer and prognosticator extraordinaire! How are you, Madam?

As well as can be expected, given the current trends.

Well, that certainly sounds ominous.

You think I'm ominous, you should see the omens! Heh, heh. Little fortune-teller joke there.

Heh. Well, let's start with a lighter note then, shall we? Who's going to win the World Series?

Sports I got no interest in. Professional sports is a dead end.

Why?

Look at the big picture. First there's all the bigtime athletes looking for the big bucks, all the shady business maneuvers by the owners, the manipulation by the media, all this divisive stuff. Then you got the drugs, the bionic enhancements, all the interactive training and implants, nanomachines, bioreconstruction --

Beg pardon?

Oh, sorry -- sometimes I get confused which year it is. Anyways, sports could handle all that, y'know? But just wait til the artificial athletes check in. With those boychicks around, you'll see the last human sports stars ridden outta town on a rail. Five years, max.

Whew! That's not a nice picture.

Nice, you think the future is? You oughta read my new book, I Seen the Future And It Ain't Pretty. Just $129.95 at your local Amazon download kiosk.

Ahem.

Yeah, well --

What do you see happening to popular music, Madam?

Call me Zuzu, sweetie. First off, those Big Five or whatever record companies? The ones that everyone gripes about? They're gonna save music.

From what?

From the ten zillion wannabes trying to find someone, anyone, to listen to their awful songs. The Great Crud Flood, they'll call it. The Internet won't be able to handle the volume of dreck getting flung around. You'll get mp3 spams, hundreds every day, enough to drown every server in the world, all these guys desperate for just one ear to clog . CD's'll be down to $1.98. Then comes the guys on the white horses. Big five -- big three by then, actually -- start a pay-per-listen download service, only the best stuff, no basement tapes from ten year old Evis-fetishists. Music is saved. But the downside is, no more record stores. Only way you get your music in your hand is from

An Amazon download kiosk?

Who's the gypsy seer here, you or me?

Other entertainment? The movies?

Movies are gonna really get hot soon. You think you seen Hollywood? You ain't seen no Hollywood like this. When the virtual actors really get started, it'll be movies on demand. You want Lionel Barrymore and Madonna in the Wizard of Oz? You got it. But the real money'll be in personal visual assistants.

Okay, I'll bite.

Personal visual assistants, or "pocket idiots" as they'll come to be known, are what you'll talk to instead of the real person. Sort of a tarted-up answering machine. They can look just like you, have your voice, your personality, everything. They can tell your wife you're working late at the office when you're out making the wild thing with your secretary. Only watch out for that secretary, she might not be the real thing either. And watch out for your wife, too -- she might end up running off with your pocket idiot.

Whew! Let's go for something simple. How about politics?

Don't ask. Just don't go there. You'll sleep better, believe me.


9/23/02

Cell phones are inventions of infernal powers that want us to be distracted everywhere, all the time. I need to get one soon. I just hope I'm not stuck with Verizon. I hate that company with a passion I normally reserve for really revolting things like nuclear weapons and pro-life gunsels. It isn't because they're a big fat company -- there are plenty of those. It isn't because in their former life as AirTouch Cellular they wouldn't hire me because I talked too much in the training session -- I been thrown outta lots better places. It isn't even because I had an AirTouch account and had to report the same stolen phone four times before the charges stopped appearing on my bill. No. What I hate them for is their ads.

I'm sure Verizon's ad agency got plenty excited at the idea of coopting the V-for-victory/peace sign as a branding logo for their chump cell phone service. I'll bet somebody got a big fat raise behind that one, yessiree. And every time some overvitalized model lifts her million dollar manicured fingers in the gesture, I instinctively respond with another, the mudra variously described as the Bird, the Flip Off or the Middle Finger of Friendship. I try to be discrete in public, o'course -- it's hard to aim a hand sign, and that ugly biker in the next lane might misunderstand my distaste at the prominent billboard on the Aurora viaduct. But it's down to being a reflex.

What's the problemo, citizen? The 60's, in case you haven't noticed, are over. Why the biggie size beef with yet another commercial spasm?

Dude. Brudderman. Lover. They are stealing our souls.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that the significant question of human life is whether to commit suicide. Maybe he just needed some Prozac. Still, the uncomfortable question remains: what keeps us alive? Food, shelter and clothing, certainly. But two of those are shared by the entire zoological spectrum, and clothing is just substitute hide. What do people need?

Art. Culture. Society. Recreation. All those irrelevant things that give people enough of a sense of self to stand to go pull levers in the factory for subsistence wages for the Man. All those frivolous, worthless, unprofitable things that the International Monetary Conspiracy endlessly wars upon in the name of the Great God Production, that get cut from school budgets and city hall budgets and state budgets and national budgets because they take valuable resources away from the really important stuff like drug enforcement and tobacco subsidies. Things people do for free, because they want to.

For free? Wa-a-ait a minute! Do I smell an opportunity here or what? Next thing you know there's Genuine Grade A Kulchur being sold to the masses like Pringles -- ground up, sterilized, reconstituted, pressed to the perfect shape to fit into that tube. Once you pop you just can't stop. And guaranteed nutritionally worthless. Ain't commerce grand?

Now you can argue that Pringles are still chips, more or less, and still made out of potatoes, more or less, but what is ground up and spit out by the mass media is nothing less than the vital innards of human society. Soylent Green is people! It's a Tragedy of the Commons raised to its most profound level. And like that pastoral example, it leads directly to the destruction of the very thing that gives it substance.

It's arguably that the current Age of Irony we're experiencing is the direct result of everything that people take seriously being stolen and sold back to us on late night television or in porno mags. If Truth, Love and Beauty are just grist for the commercial mill, what the hell is there to care about?

If there was a civil court to sue the guilty parties for their underwear for the damage they've done to the human experience, somebody would be walking out in a barrel. But in the meantime, my vulgar digit will just have to suffice.


9/16/02

I had every intention this week of making some heavy pronouncement about 9/11, alias the Big Drama Of Our Time. But you know what? Screw it. It's been done. Up, down, sideways, inside out, every which way but loose. And all I can do is add more lacrimose tripe to the stew.

Instead, I have in mind a much more important matter, one that bears the closest attention, one that impacts my life like nothing else: plum butter.

Yes, it's plum butter time here at good ol' Chickadee Glen, and while with one thing and another it hasn't been the most prolific of years, still, here we are once more, canning up that good ol' deep purple goo.

It's a process perfected over years of study and practice, going all the way back to that other halcyon year of 1984. We'd moved out of a perfectly good home on Lummi Island the previous spring and spent a year on the road playing lounge music in destination resorts in Canada. Now, we wanted to settle down again. We were sick of hotels and motels, weary of road food, one of the wheels had fallen off our trailer, and besides, our cat was pregnant. We lucked into a little cottage with a big yard in north Portland, a three-room loaf of bread sporting cherry, plum and walnut trees.Through the summer, they bloomed and fruited, while the kittens grew fat and frisky and I tinkered in the trailer, Mister Fix-it's Laboratory. The mother cat somehow found her babies mice to practice on, and once a small and very astonished garter snake, which performed its fabled duty by slithering away into the lawn from beneath the paws of one of the kittens, leaving him even more puzzled than usual.

In the fall the fruit ripened, and faced with the choice of harvesting or enduring the endless harassment of yellowjackets, we canned up several dozen jars worth. They came by many names. There was The Plum Butter of 1984, Purple Plum Preserves, Triple Plum Butter, and some that may have just been That Stuff. Despite experience of my grandmother's preserves, I protested when Sandahbeth began raiding neighboring trees for more material. But during the next dozen years, through thick and thin, houses, trailers, vans and RV's, Tucson heat and East Coast winter, those depositories of natural sugar and flavor and aromatherapy were reminders of a summer, tranquil in retrospect, when we lived in a little house with a big yard and a calico kitten with two-colored eyes gazed at us benignly from the crotch of a hundred year old cherry tree.

We opened the last jar in our first actual purchased home, a doublewide in an urban trailer park. A year later we moved into our present digs, partly drawn by the presence of -- yes -- plum trees in the yard. Plum butter has been an annual occurrence nearly every year since. Our first few attempts stumbled -- despite any evidence to the contrary, you can't can in a microwave -- but the last few seasons have seen myriad jars laid down. We still have containers of Golden Summer Plum Butter, the 2000 vintage. Last year, Chickadee Glen Plum Butter was powerful solace. And this year, it's Pappy's Pure Plum Preserves, in honor of the character I portrayed -- "that lovable guy with a rubber nose and a soul to match" -- as a member of that singular musical act, the Filucies. We've even branched out into spiced plum butter, hot plum sauce, plum chutney.

The process is down to a drill. Shake the trees, get bonked on the head by falling fruit, gather the li'l easter eggs off the ground, wash and pit them, liquefy them in the barely-functional VitaMix we inherited from S's mom, bake the resulting sweet sludge at 200 degrees until it's rich and thick, can it up and boil the jars for ten minutes. Add logo and hide in a dark cool place (no, not Lou Reed's basement). Take out and enjoy later.

We may not be as rich as Donald Trump, but by golly, we know how to live.






9/9/02

Last week, the Weird Old Woman Of Cupertino, Apple Computer, announced the release of Jaguar, the latest version of their newer-than-tomorrow operating system OS X. If it was any newer it'd be sci fi. Early adopters (quite a number, actually --over 100,00 units moved already) characterize it as a little faster and slightly easier to use.

Only problem is, OS X may never see the insides of most of the Apple hardware currently in use. Why? Because more and more, Apple is splitting away from its former core constituancy. Anybody with a non-G3 Mac they're not about to junk, anybody with a non- OS X application they happen to like, anyone who's gotten used to the look and feel and sneaky tricks of older Mac OS's and isn't eager to ascend the learning curve yet again, is being flushed out like a spider in a drainpipe. Apple is increasingly refusing to support any system or hardware below the current manufacturing line (G3 and G4 processors, OS X).

And that's a lotta itsiesbitsies, too. Last I heard, barely 3 million Mac-ers had gone X, as opposed to about 10 million that hadn't. X isn't necessarily hard to use, although its Heap o' Features can lead to any number of conflict bellyaches that even helpful online techs can't decipher ("Error -3286? You can't have that on your machine.") And its combination of spendiness and incompatibility is not an enormous selling point. Commentators have noted that the removal of the traditional Happy Mac from the startup screen may be a sign of ominous significance.

Over on the Dark Side, Micro$oft is going great guns with its new Windows XP, AKA "Big Brother." To install XP, you must log in to MS and let their servers vet your machine. Moreover, the software reserves the right to reconfigure itself whenever it pleases, and there are even provisions for disabling media applications that could violate arbitrary copyright limits. And let's talk security issues!

Under the carpet, the murky-yet-obscure open source system Linux continues to gain adherents, mostly in the maximum geekhood community. Apple has a proprietary version of it inside OS X, but there are plenty other packages available for both Intel and Mac hardware. But Linux is the toy of that slim segment of the population that works with command lines and case-sensitive one-letter instructions like most people approach tv sets. Ah but! But! It's free! Naturally, governments love it.

What's going on here? The 1980's revolution of computers for the masses has turned into a technointellectual clusterfuck. Between social-darwinist sales strategies and self-indulgent feature revision, the whole origin of the personal computer movement, the promise of information appliances that were accessible, inexpensive, reliable and easy to use, is being left behind.. The brave new world of 21st century PC's is turning into a nightmare quagmire of outsized claims, broken promises, increasingly disfunctional complexity and intrusive, insulting policies.

As M$ sticks its dirty li'l fingers right...into...your... computer and Apple tries to disenfranchise the vast majority of its user base, we gaze in astonishment at a historic opportunity: the chance to come up with a cool, simple to use, flexible, non-gearhead operating system, the equivalent of the original Mac OS, sophisticated enough under the hood to handle today's gigaherz iron but stable and simple enough not to need a degree in computer science to use. All three of the dominant platforms, Wintel, Mac and 'nix, have succumbed to feature entropy and intermodular instability. Win and Mac are additionally hampered by a vast and inconsistant (especially in the PC world) installed base and legacy software stockpile that drains their vitality both by forcing backward compatibility (or mass orphaning) and by reducing demand through competition by much cheaper unsupported alternatives (ie, wot the customer already gots). It's clear that an awful lot of potential buyers are keeping their hands on their wallets and waiting for a real change, not just another marketing scam.

I myself have stalled on system 8.6, a compromise between the PPC -unfriendly 7.5.3 that I run on a pair of Quadras I use for legacy software and CD burning and Sandahbeth's wonky 9.1 that clutters up her iMac DV. I can run nearly every application I own on my upgraded 9500, I get 500 Mhz (with the promise of 800 already in the air) and all the PCI slots I can handle, which gives me the option of adding USB and Firewire and ATA support to my serial-ADB-SCSI portage. That lets me use any Mac peripheral I can lay hands on, with the possible exception of a Plus keyboard. It's a swiss-army-knife setup. I have as close to ideal as you can get with used gear, and best of all, I paid less for the whole setup than I would for a used bondi blue iMac. I don't have a reason in Luxemburg to upgrade.

With Mac trying to steal customers from Wintel and linux lurking in the shadows, a new op system might seem like so much excess baggage. But excess baggage is exactly what starting from scratch might avoid. No legacy apps. No old code to support. Especially, no feature bloat to emulate. Could be a good thing.

But the challenge in coming up with something new is just that -- something new. What's the next interface metaphor gonna be? What basis will the OS work from? What paradigm of information processing is going to yield the most bang for the buck?

Quite frankly, I haven't the slightest idea. But I know an opportunity when I smell one. I kinda wish I was really a programmer and not just a guy who learned assembler in college.

There are ultimate answers to these questions, but they're still in the future future. The obvious way for a computer to function is to simply answer your questions and obey your commands, like on Star Trek. The interface would be an invisible servant with a million hands who knows everything and who accomodates your personal style of work, becoming more and more perceptive of your needs as time goes on.

Think of it this way: when automobiles were first invented, they were clunky, cranky, idiosyncratic hulks of iron that took two men and a machine shop to keep on the road. Early pop music blessed us with the song "He Had to Get Out (And Get Under)," a woman's lament of her boyfriend's thralldom to his horseless conveyance. Gradually, though, these cantankerous machines became more and more, dare I say, user friendly, til we came to the relatively (I said relatively) trouble-free modern vehicle, so easy to use that they're stolen by children and large animals and driven by drunks, morons and Republicans without fear nor favor. All the computer industry or anybody else needs to do is come up with computers as easy to use and as consistantly configured as automobiles.

But that's not gonna happen this year, or next year either. Too bad. I'm still looking forward to the Information Age.


9/2/02

[Note: I'm generally loth to expose the soft underbelly of my private journal to public scrutiny, but this particular entry gets the job done fairly well, if a trifle unpleasantly. Call me fearless. This is what Thaddeus looks like talking to himself.]

From The Spaecraft Chronicles, Vol. III: I'm Expensive But I'm Worth It

8/28

Another hospital another surgery. Been away from these joints long enuf to make em a nuisance again.

S's hip appliance busted and her leg dislocated so she's back for round 3 of the Get Hip Trip. Third time's the charm, she sez.

Fine. Another episode of life interrupted. Another opportunity to be kind generous unselfish forbearing and charitable. Just great.

Had a big dustup last week and finally blurted out that I couldn't see any light at the end of this tunnel. I have no goals or dreams or anything to look forward to.

Obviously this is a good thing to bring to conscious attention. Equally obviously, it's a suck thing to be involved in.

Course, I haven't ever been big on goals. Mostly I've looked no farther ahead than the next job. I've seldom dealt with my dreams strategically -- like most people.

But goals are more than just duties to my talents -- they're carrots hung on the stick of time. So they have to be worth achieving.

So what's worth doing? Not much, really. A whole list of humanitarian goals, from pain relief to feeding the world, are stomped under the iron heel of the general inhumanity of the race. Why "save" the children so they can grow up to become suicide bombers or sweatshop slaves?

And if not selfless, how much less useful is selfish ambition? Cock on dunghill, eh?

Oh, I'm in a perfect mood for this, I can see right now.

I'm left with the most trivial of motivations -- toys, play, consumption. Ol' Uncle Tom Pynchon's Mindless Pleasures. I don't see any farther than the end of my dick.

Driving on Aurora the other day, I spotted a gray minivan for sale at a dealship for a decent price. After having another mini pull my chain before OCF, I stopped and drove it. Then yesterday I got S and drove her in it. Both of us are strongly urged to get it.

But countering that is my innate resistance to increasing my debt for uncertain purposes. I upgraded my computer on credit without a second thought -- I knew improving capacity would pay off eventually. But I don't have any clear vision of the utility of a minivan.

The obvious reason S and I want it, I think, is that we both wish for the old days -- rolling down the highway in a van to a music job. That was our life for most of our marriage.

Now we're stuck in a life of drudgery -- construction and rehab. We both pine. The van is a security blanket, a comfort food, a nostalgia trip.

More, it's a tool we'd need if we seriously intend to go back to music. If that's a goal, it's a limited one, but the price is barely right on this beast.

I've been down on vans from two years of owning a good hatchback. 30 mpg is hard to give up. Likely I'll keep the Mazda for everyday driving and the van for Sunday go to church, gigs and the like.

So why not get the van? I'll grab other comforts on credit -- windows, decks, computers -- so why not a van?

Because I'm not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Because I'm just too low energy. Because I don't believe in Amber Tide.

The obvious response to all this is just what the calendar sez -- try it and see. Go ahead and buy the bloody van -- your credit will handle it and the monthly cost isn't a budget buster, and three or four decent gigs would pay the thing off handily. And at worst, you'd just sell it for about what you paid.

And it's an investment in the future, and of hope.

I've had people quoting my own lines back at me of late. Moh reminded me to Have Fun Now. And S pointed out that there's no hope at all -- if you don't choose it.

It's bad enough being preached at by other people, but being preached at by me is durn near intolerable.

Fine, I'll buy the van. Shut up already.

[Postscript: Sandahbeth's hip was badly infected. The doctor removed the old appliance and put her on intravenous antibiotics. In six weeks or so if the infection's gone he'll put in another one. The good news is that she's still got bone enough to get one.

While she was in surgery, I went out and bought the van, which turned out to be deep blue, not gray. He consequently drove me and two bandmates to a gig up in Roslyn (the town where Northern Exposure was filmed) with no problems and great comfort. Hope springs eternal.]