Archive for October, 2014

We are this close to the midterm elections and the goddamn GOP is about to close it hard on irrational fear.

Isis and Ebola.

Fear porn.

How did we get here?

Completely random elaborately imagined clusterfucks that would not survive the advent of oxygen or sunlight if applied.  I am sick to death of fear masquerading as politics.

As reason.

The phenomena says two things about the American electorate.  Neither one is pretty.  The first reveals that by and large, most of us are dumb as fucking sticks.  Exasperatingly gullible.  The second one is not much better.  It says that progressive, forward thinking people are still too goddamn lazy or passive to muster a counter offensive to such ridiculous bullshit.

It’s unbelievably absurd that this late in the game, republicans can so conveniently and confidently count on the stupid, that they can actually be an efficacious tipping point in these midterm elections.  It’s unreal to me.  I’ve seen it happen over and over in my lifetime and I still can’t believe it.  Republicans call on the idiots and they show up in droves and democrats sit at home because they just aren’t quite afraid enough.

I am in awe.

The Orcs mass at the drawbridge while the democrats enjoy the first course of baby arugula with gorgonzola and candied almonds and a delightful raspberry vinaigrette.  We hear there is some sort of garlic roasted chicken on the way.

We’re so arrogant and complacent, so self righteous and magnanimous to imagine that our celebration and luxury of the upper moral hand is a luxury that we have somehow earned and much, much worse, deserve.

The teabillies will not win this election, we will lose it.

If it goes badly this November, it won’t because they lied and thieved and stole every vote they could.  It won’t be because they cheated an disenfranchised minority democrats and women.  They can and will do all these things. They are doing all these things.  They are enabled by the highest court in the land.  It is absolutely rigged by ugly, shameless, racist justices.  It’s awful and disgraceful and completely true.  The hypocrisy of the highest court in the the land is invasive and cloying.

There remains no question that in this age of entertaining the notion of impeaching and prosecuting the president of the United States, that we should instead be legitimately evaluating the impeachment and prosecution of various members of the supreme court for reasons far more compelling and egregious.

Over half of the highest court in the land is occupied by bought and paid for by good old boys.  They attend, speak and acquire remuneration from the filthiest of the filthy.  They never even contemplate recusal.  Profoundly corrupt as evidenced by their decisions as much as their abject failure to decide.  I am so with the notorious RBG.  She’s my heroine.  Otherwise, they are a scorch as well as a scourge on democracy and perhaps the single best reason to get your ass to the booth.

Having said that, if we lose, it will be because not enough of us showed the fuck up.

If voting in America were compulsory, no one would ever give a mad fuck what the 99% thinks or even wants.  No contest.  We would be a true social democracy and the bastards would still be rich as hell but they would not be in a position to rob us blind.  To suck every last drop from us.  To dictate social policy.  To shame the most stupid among us into voting against their own best interests because of christian family values.  To sell us so much fear and distraction that so many actually believe that Ebola and Isis are an actual credible threat to day to day life.

The idea that Isis or Ebola represent an existential threat is the property of obtuse.

It is the silliest and most illogical nonsense I have ever witnessed and yet, it’s working.

If we lose it’s because we are in an irreparable state of moron.

Once again, America takes my breath away.

Fuck you.

Drinks for my friends.

 

I still remember vinyl. The whole audio visual experience of riding my bike to the record store, buying a vinyl album, bringing it home, removing the shrink wrap, putting it on the turntable.

I remember setting the needle down, reading the liner notes, the smell of polyvinyl chloride and cardboard and ink. And then of course, the sound.

I remember it with Kiss Destroyer.  Joe Walsh The Smoker You Drink The Player You Get.  James Taylor.  Fleetwood Mac.  Supertramp.  Deep Purple.  Carole King.  Led Zeppelin.  Heart.

Analog.

There was vinyl, there was the eight track tape and the cassette tape.

All analog.

I availed myself of all these mediums as a kid.  I was absolutely enthralled by music and the mediums it was available on.  More than comic books.  More than the literature I was beginning to discover.  More immediate and compelling.  More than anything I knew.

We began to play instruments my friends and I.  They were gifted, I was not.  Thank dog I figured that out pretty early.  If I hadn’t, my life would have sucked.  But still, music.  Like nothing else, it reached all my corners.

So as I began to realize that I would never be any kind of musician, I began to understand that I perceived recorded music, the production and engineering of it, somehow more acutely than my musically gifted friends.  I discovered sometime later that I have, for lack of a better word, a “condition” called synesthesia.  I see sound in my head.  I can replay it in my head for a very long time after I’ve first heard it.  Every note, every sound.

I decided I was going to be a recording engineer before I even knew what that meant.

I involved myself as much as possible.  I waded in on my friends four track cassette recorders.  I discovered the limitations of really shitty EQ.  I started to understand reverb and delay.  I began to invest in stereo equipment.

I relinquished my managerial position at a fast food restaurant to work in my small town’s only record store.

I decided to go to school and study the craft.

I graduated with a 4.0 and received the outstanding graduate award.

I moved to Los Angeles and got hired as a janitor at the best recording studio in the world just before I turned 23.

I began to engineer and produce within a few years.

I produced, recorded and mixed my first record when I was 28 years old.

Less than a year after that, I co-produced and engineered a record that went platinum.

My point is this, I know music.  I know recorded sound.

Here’s the story.  What I know now is killing me.  I worked in a record store when compact discs first came out.  Perfect digital sound.  I thought they were amazing. I thoroughly enjoyed blowing the fuses on the the record store system with Pachelbel’s Canon. Signal to noise ratio was just too much.

I moved a lot in the years after and decided to keep hauling my books from apartment to apartment and forego my vinyl.  Huge mistake.  I am still grateful I kept my books.

I went to work in a recording studio and discovered the warmth of vacuum tubes and analog tape.  If you push tubes too hard, the distortion you get manifests itself in even order harmonics.  If you push analog tape too hard it compresses and eventually distorts but it’s still even order harmonic distortion.  The distortion is arguably pleasant because it is complimentary, it’s still, for all intents and purposes, in tune.  Digital recording and processing, when overloaded, produces harmonic distortion that is dissonant.  Of an odd order.  Third order.  Out of tune.  Not pleasant.  Ugly.  It’s an over simplification but it’s true.

I made quite a few records in my day and we always stayed analog until the last possible moment.  We mixed to half inch analog tape at 30 ips and cut our album sequence together the old fashioned way.  With razor blades and huge half inch analog tape reels.  Only then would we take it to mastering.  Only then would we load the project into the digital domain necessary to mass produce compact discs for public consumption.  We had the benefit of a pretty famous mastering engineer  shepherding us through this process.  Sometimes, going to mastering can be like going to the dentist for a cleaning.  It is then that you find out how bad you fucked up the record and what the mastering engineer can do to save your rotting mouth.

This man, this mastering engineer in particular, was and is a genius.  He often provided service and attention beyond our budget.  He was kind.  And there were times when he escorted us very gently into the digital domain because the record we had made required very little of his expertise.  There were times when he did much more than we deserved or could pay for.  He always did it though.  He would always say “got a little money, get a little EQ”. And then he would do whatever was necessary to make us look good.  It’s a fine art.  A voodoo art.

At one point or another he earned the dubious distinction of “Digital Dave”.  I made the mistake of referring to him by that name not long ago and he bristled.  So I understand that now more than ever.

Digital is evil.

Fast forward to the present.

I have just recently forayed into the world of recording again.  It’s been more than a decade since I’ve miced a drumkit.  I used to be pretty damn good at this and I found out I still am.  But it’s all digital now.  I rented some analog gear to cut the tracks. Neves, APIs Ureis.  I recorded to an old school Mackie 24 bit hard drive.  Not a Studer A800 III.

We transferred those recordings to a PreSonus hard drive with Studio One software to mix.  I am mixing with a mouse and a keyboard.  This is where I begin to hate digital.  I am impressed with it at the same time, however.  The compression, the EQ, the gates, work amazingly well.  I could not get the buss compressor to sound like an SSL and I could not get the snare reverb to sound exactly like an AMS nonlin program, but I got pretty goddamn close.  That AMS sound was a bitch.  Took me three separate presets and monkeying with the parameters for hours to mimic it.

Here’s where it all falls down.

Night before last I took a disc home.  We had been printing to a standalone CD burner. This time we’re out of the recordable discs that we can use for this particular piece of gear.  So we make an MP3 and put it on a disc in a MAC.  I bring it home, load it up and hear all the sonic shortcomings on my ridiculously expensive stereo.  Trust me, my shit is beyond reproach.  Best system you will ever hear.

I was confused for a time.  Where’s my bottom?  Where’s my top?  What is this weird frequency smear?

It sounds like shit.

Data compression.  All the world transacts music through tiny little ear buds now.  It’s an absolute tragedy.  A travesty.  It’s no longer art.  Why in the world would I aspire to make a good recording anymore?  It was the first time I’d ever actually listened to an MP3 file of any music, much less my own work.

I am in awe.  This is what everyone is listening to.  I’ve been listening to commercial radio again these days.  Where there is melody, it’s Fisher Price.  Production and engineering is clumsy.  Like a woman who has no idea how to walk in heels.  There is no product.  There is no art.  There is no artist identity or integrity.  It’s like music is over.  Give us a loop with subwoofer worthy excitement and an auto-tuned chorus mixed by some dickhead engineer who can make it the right kind of crunchy and we’ll put it on the Disney Chanel to lift pre-adolescent  skirts and sell phones and apps and gum.  Music is no longer performed and it’s no longer about performance.  It is assembled.  It’s fucking cheap.

Lowest common denominator.

There was a time in the not too distant past when an earnest musician with a modicum of talent could eek out a living in this country.  People not only enjoyed but actively sought out the practice and display of the craft.  People actually craved the visceral immediacy of live performance.  No loops, no tapes, just real players playing and putting it out there.  Now the only way to make a living is by being a tribute band or by being an actual famous artist from that era of yesterday.  Even those famous artists barely make a dime off of their recordings anymore.  They only make money by appearing as themselves live.

I can’t stand it.

I’m going to get to the point now.  This vulgar phenomenon is a metaphor for just about everything in contemporary American life.  There are no record stores anymore.  There are no book stores anymore.  You can view masterpiece paintings online all day but it’s no substitute for standing in front of them and being able to see the brushstrokes and experience the color and palette and technique.  The goddamn genius.   Movies are increasingly sequels or remakes of tired ideas with more automatic gunfire and violence.  The only attempted update is well, more realistic violence.  More exaggerated violence.  More profoundly ridiculous violence.

This is not about me, some middle aged dude staring down the barrel of 50 years on this planet screaming get off my lawn.  This is about contemporary American society in decline.  Everything is now disposable.  Nothing valuable is worth a shit anymore and everything that’s not is now a priority.  Perception is far more valuable than understanding and appreciation.

You can apply this notion to food, to cars, to just about anything.

The very first sign of the  rapid decline of America on the world stage is our failure to appreciate what makes a society great.  Our contribution to the arts.  We no longer give a mad fuck about it.  We barely contribute anything meaningful anymore.  We lead the charge in discounting and devaluing it.  We no longer teach music in our schools.  Journalism is widely regarded as a joke.  Writers and painters have less of a chance of making a living than ever before and film makers only make money by being specious hacks.  There are entire generations now in this country that have no real understanding of the value of art at all.  They have never seen it or experienced it.  It all goes hand in hand with the rampant concentration of wealth, the insidious increase of money in politics.  The precipitous atrophy of the middle class.

The erosion of compassion is a secondary symptom.  The rise and celebration of avarice is perhaps tertiary but also the next to last stage of the lethal cancer we are actively succumbing to.

Our relevance will die, our society will fail, once our addiction to fear becomes so profound that the waging of war becomes our exclusive occupation and identity and we are well on our way.  We are in the advanced throes of this infection.  We have been practicing it non stop for 60 years.  Most of the world knows us more for our ability to make war than uniquely American contributions to art and culture like jazz, or rock and roll or our great writers and artists and film makers.

Nice calling card huh?

Welcome to stage four.

“When Winston Churchill was Prime Minister and he was told that there were going to be major cuts in arts and culture because of the mounting costs of World War II, he responded with a simple reply, ‘Then what are we fighting for?’”

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

 

Guess what pisses me off.

It’s a rhetorical question.

Precious liberals who quake at the very notion of Obama being anything less than the liberal messiah.

I am sick of this shit.

I criticize our savior and panty waste liberals piss themselves over my abhorrent blasphemy.

I’m an apostate.

A stranger in a strange land.

Instead, all you hand wringing “liberals” waste time and energy on indignancy over the latest birther conspiracy theories.  Like the idea that Michelle Obama was born a man and therefore cannot be the mother of the first daughters  Really?  Without a doubt if these people appear in front of you in the streets, take the time to piss all over their shoes.  But otherwise, pay them no mind.

Grow up. He’s part of the machine. When it comes to the military industrial complex, he is but a cog. When it comes to America’s overt and unchecked aggression around the world, Obama doesn’t dictate policy, he merely manages it for public consumption.

If he screws it up, liberals are perceived as soft on terror and law and order and we suck in the mid term elections and risk the general.  Because the fear has been mismanaged.  The President of the United States manages perception and expectation.  He does not dictate policy.  Policy has been the purview of oligarchs and plutocrats for decades before our current commander in chief was even born.

Get over it.

Grow the fuck up.

And yes, your vote counts because the more you vote, the more your vote counts.  If voting didn’t count there wouldn’t be such elaborate efforts to suppress it.  Efforts that are breathtaking in audacity.  Hundreds of thousands of women and minorities disenfranchised because the bastards understand they cannot possibly win a fair fight.   Get used to the idea of choosing between the lesser of two evils until the majority of progressives show up at the goddamn polls every time.

Consistency.  When this happens, we will be heard and change will occur.

But you don’t show up.

Even though we are the majority.

People who care, people that want economic equality, people who want justice, people who realize how pointless perpetual war is, are the majority.  Not just in this country, but across the globe.

It’s far easier for the opposition to manipulate the stupid than it is for our side to inspire the intelligent.  It’s so much easier to fool a man than it is to convince him he’s been fooled.

Organizing liberals is like herding cats.

We are a nation at war.  It is what we do.  We have spent all but a few decades of our entire history doing exactly that.  We spend more than half what the rest of the entire world does on it.  Like a trillion dollars a year.  Really.  That’s sick.  We could cut our “defense” budget in half and solve poverty, homelessness and infrastructure.  We could provide free health care and education for every single citizen.  Other countries do it all the time.  They pay for all that.  Because they don’t make war their main business.

But we don’t.

Because we are led to believe we should be very afraid.

Does that sound like a profound addiction to violence to you?

An abominable addiction to fear?

Is it any wonder that we are perceived by the rest of the world as a country of loud mouthed assholes?

We have earned that distinction by killing inordinate amounts of people all over the goddamn planet for our entire history.

Even our own from time to time.  It was quite convenient.

We really are badass.

It’s not Obama’s fault.  But it is his problem.

It is our problem.

He’s not handling it particularly well these days.

Neither are we.

We don’t win wars anymore.  We fight them.  We start them.  The two longest wars of our history are our two last wars.  Obama pisses me off because he’s in his second term and he’s not refusing any of it.  He won’t do it.  He’s polite.  He’s respectful.  Reasonable.  Qualities I confess I admire.  But I can’t stand it anymore.  He’s being as much in the face of insanity.  He could lead.  He could roll the dice and risk it all.  Say what he thinks and force what he knows.  But he won’t.  He may just be our last best chance before we have a third world war.

But he won’t.

I can’t stand it.

We the people, have to make him.

That’s the way it works.  That’s the way it always works.  It’s the way it’s always worked.

Otherwise we just start bombing the shit out of brown people again.  Like we are now.  Tens if not hundreds of thousands will die, many of them innocent civilians and when it’s all over, it will be way more fucked up than when we started.  It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.  Over and over and over.  Every goddamn time we do this we succeed in only making it worse.

And then, we just must go in and clean it up yet again.  We just must.  Yet again.  Yet again.  Over and over again.

And the scary thing is this, that’s the idea.  This is what your leaders, your elected representatives WANT.

So some of you liberals get all fierce and brave and block me from your pages for broaching the subject.  For being unpatriotic.  For being less than American.  For pointing it out.

Cowards.

You endorse aggression because of fear.  Fear of ISIS or Ebola or immigrants or Islam.

I seem to remember a time when liberals were pragmatic and I’m pretty sure it coincided with conservatives being stupid but sane.

The evil elite count on your confusion, your disillusion,  they count on it, they have come to expect it.  The stupid are always certain and vote with conviction, the well informed always have doubts because they are intellectually responsible by nature and are confused because they are open minded and just plain curious.  So they end up sacrificing the good for the sake of the perfect and throw their weight and vote behind some ridiculous goofecock like Ralph Nader.  You people really chap my ass.

Get a grip liberals.

You are the difference.  You are the majority.  If you just show up and vote consistently, you get able bodied employment, the ability to compete in a global market.  All of it.  No more slack jawed morons rewriting textbooks in Texas to promote creationism in classrooms, no more revocation of a woman’s right to actually vote or dominion over her own biology.  No more banks preying on you with egregious policies and interest rates.  No more flammable tap water and carcinogenic air and soil and food.

All of it because that’s what Americans want, and if Americans vote, we can have it.

Think about that.

You will never get everything you want.  But if you don’t show up and participate, you will only get what you don’t want.  You will only get what horrifies and disgusts you.  Like now.  And it will be no one’s fault but your own.

This blog is dedicated to my facebook friend Lizzie Borden who passed just the other day at the ripe young age of 76.  I will miss her fierceness and wit in defending common sense, compassion and her ardent defense of humanity.  She was a beautiful fish in a sea of cynicism.  May she rest in peace and may her family be comforted by the fact that she always took the high road and never feared to tread and resist in the company of those who would forgo decency  for avarice, to battle against those who would forsake love for power.

She was a gorgeous human being.

Drinks for my friends.