9/29/03

There's nothing quite like being the geek of the class, straight A's and totally clueless, to set you up for a self-righteous philosophy ripped out of Nietzsche via Molly Hatchet, with a light frosting of monomania and butchy sex. For two or three years there I was as evil as a pimply 16 to 18 year old boy could be, and even after I gave up on Lady Logic I spent a few more years beating my head against the brick walls of anybody willing to give me a fight about Earth Versus The Noble Individual or however I incoherently perceived it.

Perhaps I quit too soon -- there's a powerful contingent of Randists scattered through the whole of current US policy-making, most notoriously Alan Greenspan, who as a youth was a part of Herself's inner circle, right up to the point that it imploded when she got the hots for a protege half her age and spent her final few years up to her upturned nose in scandal. Maybe I coulda gotten a cushy job buttering some superbureaucrat's toast or summit.

Unlike Greenspan, though, I've been in recovery for quite some time, and one of the aftereffects of the whole hideous episode is my penchant for teasing apart some of Rand's most flagrant violations of the real world as entertainment and a kind of negative proving ground. In the tradition of Captain Peachfuzz on the old Rocky Show who became the oracle of a tropical island's native population because he was unfailingly wrong about everything, I take perverse pleasure in proving the exact opposite of Auntie Aynal's solipsistic syllogisms.

At the heart of darkness of her philosophy lurks a book whose title says it all: The Virtue of Selfishness. Yeah, baby, let it all hang out. Her basic take on life, love and the suchness of it all is that taking care of number one, with a big fat drumhit on take, is the only way to run a railroad. (One of her fictional protagonists actually does run a railroad that way. That's why they call it fiction.) I commented before about the Flaw That Lay In The Theory Ayn Built -- her simultaneous assertion that humans are a) born without instinct (and hence work to learn everything they know, and damned well deserve the bounty of it, dammit!) and b) instinctively know what's "right" (and hence have no excuse for not doing it and damned well deserve the consequences, dammit!) This is what we call in the philosophy biz "eating your cake and having it too," aka "dumbass horseshit."

Turning from the equine fecal byproducts of Rand's work, however, I found an interesting way to examine some concerns, fecal or not, of my own by reversing that title. If I had the time (or the will, or the sitzfleisch, or I might anyways), I'd write a towering monument to reason entitled The Selfishness of Virtue.

The cornerstone of my dippy little theory is that the main purpose of a moral system is to make the practitioner feel good. I agree with Herself that any system that demands people act against their own happiness and serenity is a crock. But I have no illusions that mere physical comfort or self aggrandizement can bestow that condition. For one thing, there's no escaping the stubbed toe and the broken heart, and like Shakespeare wrote, "…there was never yet philosopher /That could endure the toothache patiently." Fame and fortune are no substitute for a satisfied mind. You need internal tools to counter the external woes that the greasy real world inevitably throws at you, faster horses or no.

So what makes people happy? More important, what keeps them happy? Why, happy thoughts, that's what. Ask me a hard one, why don't you. The hackneyed Power of Positive Thinking, thanks ever so much Mister Peale. You can think of it as the Lawrence Olivier School of Enlightenment -- LO never tried to get inside his characters, he just imitated their external actions as minutely as he could. So, practice makes perfect, and merry thoughts lead to a merry heart. The cultivation of and stalwart adherence to a cheerful, optimistic mindset has also been fingered in numerous studies as a precursor for health and long life.

You can see where I'm going with this, I'm sure. What causes people to harm each other? Beyond brute competition for scarce resources, there's little payoff in gratuitous pain. I'll go out on a limb here and state the obvious: People hurt each other because they're unhappy themselves. Duh. But take it a little farther: deliberately hurting others requires (unless you're a psychopath, in which case all bets are drawn) that you accede to or even churn up an unhappy, negative perception of them. From gossip to rapine and murder, the perp is gonna hurt, a lot. Hatred and fear and loathing and prejudice and all that just plain feel bad.

Lawrence Olivier again -- refrain from harming others and you feel better. Presto chango, the Selfishness of Virtue. Slick, huh? It could be argued that I'm dealing in crooked syllogisms here, that just because a jolly person doesn't kill, refraining from killing won't necessarily make you into Santy Claus. Reasoning from the converse n all that. But the idea here isn't just high-minded intellectual nonviolence, it's nonviolence inspired by that aforementioned merry heart. Post hoc, proctor hoc, if anything.

By abstaining from hatred, from envy and spite and rage and all that, by loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek and all those sissy-sounding nicey-nicey girl scout cookie behaviors, you're reaping the extremely personal reward of happiness, and probably good health and long life in the bargain, assuming nobody's siccing hungry lions on you in a coliseum for being so frickin' cheerful all the time.

And who knows? It might even get you laid more often. Is that selfish enough for ya?

9/22/03

A recent thread on the internet site Slashdot ("News for nerds") took the hammer and tongs to one idea near and dear to the hearts of sfsters everywhere, the flying car. Sure, you know, just like they showed you on Walt Disney (or for you hipsters, The Fifth Element) -- in the future, Dad'll be commuting to work in a Ford SpaceEagle SUV that can go 200 knots and cruise at 20,000 feet. Uh, not. As one contributor put it, do you really want Aunt Agnes (who's a little old, you know) ditzing her SpaceEagle right down your Chimney Of The Future and into your Dotcom Retro living room? While the notion of the flying car is, in fact, rather lovely (traffic jams? just go up 500 feet. And hey -- no more ugly asphalt!), the implementation would be a nightmare of gargantuan proportions.

But there's a certain perspective that's needed to accurately conceptualize any new technology. Usually, visionaries of all stripes and timbres come up with their futurities by extrapolation, Heinlein's principle of "If this goes on..." Such extensions typically fall well short of the truth or veer wildly afield. Not surprising -- extrapolation is at best using the past to predict the future, and when did tech ever behave itself? It might be argued that the very unpredictability of an innovation is vital to its success, that only an unforeseen development has a chance of catching the status quo off guard or wedge itself into a new and overlooked niche.

Such an unexpected intruder was the Internet. Barely dreamed of in the literature of speculation, the Web burst upon us out of left, right and center fields all at once. Its wildfire success, even in the face of the bankruptcy of many of its early corporate lights, has led to an immense rearrangement of many of our most cherished social institutions. Its impact on research, on dating, on politics, on a hundred social areas is difficult to overestimate.

But nowhere has the Web been more influential than in economics. Businesses have sprung up around it like weeds around a leaky garden faucet, industries as lacking in precedent as the fertilizing source-network itself. The very manner in which that all too human preoccupation of shopping takes place has been radically reconfigured. Mail order has been supplanted by e-commerce, with the bulky, tree-looting catalogs of yore replaced by 72 dpi illustrations glowing on your CRT, and the cash-check-or-money-order and the snail mail order form by one-click(tm) credit card transactions.

I myself am more than pleased by all this. As a stalwart member of the Just-In-Time Club, I take ruthless advantage of the short lead time required to facilitate a cyber-order. In my quaint little hand-made CD business, I can leave my inventory investment in blanks and paper and ink at a comforting minimum and resupply as needed, rather than clear out a corner of my work shed for a year's worth of materials that a shift in the winds of prevailing design tastes could reduce to obsolete landfill at any moment. It's bad enough to have a thousand leftover Amber Tide CD's in the basement -- I don't need a pile of leftover CD-r's to keep them company.

There's a tradeoff here, however. The greater the dependence on any system, the greater the disruption possible through manipulation of that system. While the USPS is a slow, inefficient way (comparatively) of getting info from place to place, it has at least one distinctly positive feature: decentralization. While mail theft is a constant problem and a stone drag, it can only affect one piece of mail at a time. There's considerably greater potential for mischief in a process as organized and centrally managed as the internet, as recent killer-worm infestations have shown.

Last week, faced with a huge and profitable CD order to process, I whipped out the ol' MasterCharge and kachinged up a couple hundred smackers worth of supplies over the web. Hardly had the electronic ink dried when, out of the blue, a company in Texas called to inform me that a highly suspicious transaction had just come over their server from somebody with my name, address, phone number and cc info, seemingly lifted right off one of those oh-so-secure transaction sites I'd so fecklessly sported with lacking even the crudest of prophylactics.

Lucky phone call. Happy phone call. I immediately contacted the card company for a big ugly shot of credit penicillin, leaving me with a solitary $100 rogue charge to dispute and a ten day wait for my new card, which in the future will wear a prominent electronic rubber whenever it goes out to play.

Identity theft isn't an epidemic yet, but it's getting there. And the more that sales and services move online, the more tempting the target becomes. I myself only had my credit card jacked once, and the theft was detected and countered almost immediately. But what happens when the bulk of our transactions take place in one electronic environment, a unified trunk of communication like a huge throbbing artery just begging for a few zillion vampires to close in for a nice juicy bite?

Flying cars, man, flying cars...

9/15/03

The real irony of this unkind lot is that artists represent that portion of the human spirit that is the most human, the least beastly -- that part of us that creates, that dreams new dreams and tries to bring them to pass in the light of day.

Other animals laugh, cry, play, use tools, sing, dance -- but not like we do. For them, creativity is a barely functional adaptation with a razor-sharp dual edge: inability to cope or spin a new environmental condition and you're a dinosaur, but get just a little too cute and you pierce the ecological envelope you inhabit. A creative ant is a dead ant (deadant, deadantdeadantdeadant -- to the tune of the Pink Panther theme...)

In humans, on the other hand, the bug of creative inconsistency turns into a feature. Take away our cleverness and what's left is a pitifully underequipped excuse for a large land predatory omnivore, suitable for a zoo or some ideal garden of Eden-esque indigenous environment. All that keeps us from fading back into our proto-chimp genetic precursors is the tinkertoy civilization of technology that we teeter atop, brought to us courtesy our big bad bulging brains. And while the substance of that card castle is maintained by behavior as consistent and unimaginative as any ant's, if more complex, its inception and design is purely the product of crazy, lazy, unproductive artistic types who happened to get a bee in their butts and want to make something cool.

In the dear dead days of not so long ago, I got antsy enough about my peculiar and granulated monetary condition to check out a classified ad for housekeepers. What's to know, I figured. Plenty, I found out. And the company offering the positions was one of those exasperating examples of crawling, loathsome business success that take their financial model directly from Dracula. They were offering to pimp, uh, refer you to housecleaning jobs entirely as an independent contractor with all your own equipment and materials, paying your own taxes and providing your own transpo. For this fine service they took a fat percentage of the fee and kissed you goodbye with a nice warm smile on their larcenous faces.

While it was plain up front that I would do better to pimp myself out and ignore their questionable little agency, I was curious enough to take a flier at their application. At the bottom of the last page, after innumerable questions about previous employment, current habits and such, was the question: "Why should we hire you?" Without even thinking, the answer jumped into my mind: "Because I'm an artist."

While I walked away from the friendly bloodletters, that response stuck with me. It was right on the beano -- an artist, someone with a sense of style and design, would obviously make a better housekeeper than a dull unimaginative schlub. The only catch is that the job would drive an artist nuts, like any other dull unimaginative schlub job.

Whether art is a more-evolved or "higher" function than, say, selling melons in the market is of course the football in an endless game of sezyouohyeah played by the bohos and the tightbutts of the world, that whine vrs. snarl interplay between effete ar-teests waving their sensitive souls about like so many lacey flags and the dread ironclad knights of All That Is Proper. O'course, neither side has a ghost of a chance of winning the debate -- after all, if all the poofty creative types gave up and got jobs at McDonald's, who'd write their sleazy little slogans? And if the Order of the Golden Garter forsook their crusade and took up poetry, well -- there'd be a lot more bad poets in the world, that's all. And no one to read what they wrote.

Through a series of preposterous coincidences not worth describing, S and I lucked into a school gig last week. It was opening week at the middle school, what we used to call junior high, and the entertainment coordinator needed a practice assembly to get the dear young things used to the process, training his own chairs and bleachers crew in the process. Even a fake assembly needs real content, though, so he brought us in. We followed the principal's demonstration of the proper way to shut up and sit down and preceded a chunky type boosting this year's sleazy student activities fundraiser. Between the unruly students and the capitalist's enthusiasm, our part got whittled down to about three songs, probably the best received ten minutes of the whole affair.

In the midst of his spiel, the fundraiser guy mentioned that he'd been a musician once too, but that he had to "grow up and become a productive member of society." Far too politic to heckle a fellow performer, S and I hardly even rolled our eyes. But as the kids were filing out after the show, a bearded male teacher approached us. After complimenting our performance, he remarked on the presenter's gaff and added, "I'm going to have a few things to say to my class today about the value of the arts."

We ourselves had a few (politic) things to say to the sales rep, who admitted that he'd been a lounge musician in Vegas and Tahoe and had to quit because he was spending too much time on the road to suit his wife and kids. We left him nursing his ball and chain and made our crazy lazy artist's way home, bound ourselves by chains just as obdurate if slightly more stylish, pondering the paradox that the life of creativity engenders: that despite the important role they play in society, to be an artist is to be marginalized, patronized, trivialized and ignored -- but that it could be worse.

9/8/03

The problem was primarily coordination, but equipment came into the matter as well. One of the least attractive economic aspects of electric music is the hierarchy that results from purchasing power, the desire of thems with rich mommies to buy the sound, if not the chops, of their favorite artists, leading to a preposterous reification and attendant inflation of used American equipment. Hunks of deteriorated electronic recycling bait and cracked, warped canoe oars with strings have exchanged hands at crown-jewel prices just because of a name on a face-plate or headstock. Legions of gear snobs debate endlessly over the merits of pre-CBS Fender, tube vrs. transistor circuitry or this or that vintage stomp box that Joe Blow used on his fourth album which can be distinguished from later less valuable models by the fab date on the custom IC in the lower left hand corner of the circuit board.

Make no mistake: money can't buy you love but it can buy tone. Some of this obscessiveness is just fanboy imitation or music store hype -- but some of it isn't. Tube amps really do sound different from solid state ones, and there's a world of distinction between, say, a Gibson Super 400 and a Fender Telecaster. Of course, when you're turning everything up to eleven and running the result through a bank of stomp boxes, the distinction gets a lot thinner. One area in which it remains vital, though, is jazz.

We all grow up. As I left my teens, I developed an interest in swing, blues and the j-word. All too soon, I learned that jazz snobbery was to rock snobbery as a hand-blown flute of Chateau Lafifi was to a cracked mug of warm Bud, especially regarding gear. There was a major revolt in jazz circles when John McLaughlin, the guitarist all the other guitarists were afraid of, put down his custom hollow-body and picked up a (((gasp!))) SG .

In my own half-formed perceptions, I came to identify the fatbodied acoustic/electric configuration favored by the greats, mostly because it was all they could get back in The Day, with the kind of guitar jazz I aspired to play -- nothing fancy, no fireworks, just solid musicality and taste, the kind of elevatoresque stuff that all too easily degenerates into muzak -- but withthat sound. Don't be misled -- I still liked rock just fine. But the elegance and taste of players like Jim Hall, Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery attracted me powerfully, and they all had rich chubby f-hole jobs with "Gibson" prominently displayed upside the neck -- those that didn't get theirs custom made.

A survey of the local music stores confirmed what I'd already known: real jazz guitars were preposterously out of my budget, and imitations were no better sonically than what I had. Despite my desire to bow to peer group pressure, I just wasn't enough of a pro to rate, or afford, a pro instrument. So, Plan B: I swung by my favorite guitar palace, the place where I'd picked up my glorified surfboard of a practice electric in the first place, and inquired about possible technical solutions to my quandry.

Their resident electric guru smiled broadly and pulled a white humbucker out of the display case. "Stick this in -- it's custom wound for jazz. Put it in the neck position, turn the tone control down, close your eyes and you'll hear an L-5." At $65, it was roughly a thirtieth of what the real thing would come along for. I figured I could afford an expensive toy a lot more than even the cheapest tool and took it home. The guru was spot on -- properly adjusted, my dimestore Epiphone-by-Gibson Fender clone with the polyurythane stripped-wood finish and the faux Jackson neck did the fat and the slick like it was carved mahogany with a trapeze tailpiece. It had that sound.

Paint the walls and the carpet looks shabby. An electric guitar is only half an instrument; the other half is the amp. As soon as I'd gotten the pickup in, I realized that I needed more volume and tone than a 12 watt practice box would provide. This time I decided to go name brand if I could, partly because I had a deep seated love of Fender that went all the way back to a primal experience with a Twin Reverb at the age of 14 that left me awestruck and slightly deaf for days afterwards. I'd perused a few equipment wish-book catalogs and determined the models I could afford. I'd also sternly admonished myself that if it wasn't right, it wasn't going home with me, Fender or no.

There's a certain guitarslinger romance inherent in bringing your own ax in to test amps, an air of being really worn in with your instrument, of commitment. The staff takes you more seriously, and if they're guitarists themselves they may even trade customizing lore. After cruising a few stores I found the unit I was interested in and hauled out my Frankenstein's monster.

And something wonderful happened, something utterly gratifying. I plugged in, switched on, tuned in the sweet spot. And heads began to turn. Two teenaged thrashers ceased their chaotica wanking and came around the display to listen. Another guitar-bearing searcher listened critically, offered suggestions, expressed his approval. And a salesperson put the frosting on the cake by coming over and asking "What kind of guitar is that?" My cheesy garage-jazz solid body was a little celebrity. It wasn't my playing, I can assure you.

Needless to say, I bought the amp.

Musical tone is alchemy, a mystical confluence of elements, be they a unique bracing pattern and specially selected wood or a custom pickup and a classic amp circuit. But at this point, for me, having that sound means never having to say I'm sorry. And if the jazz police get too nervous about my irregular instrument, I can always take a picture of a proper one and make a cover to hide the body with. Maybe that'll shut them up.