mushinnoshin

Well I’ve been taking it slow, just doing a few things each weekend, trying to ease my way back in, not forcing it. There’s been some waiting as I’ve had to get a few things — the new midi controller, new monitors, a new stand, a new power supply. And I’ve still got a lot to do, getting the mixer routes all patched, with the effects and gates and eq and compressors and such all wired up.

But today, I turned it all on, for the first time in — what, is it 8 years? Maybe closer to 9, going on 10?

I’ve got sound from the xp-30. And when I fired her up, I found her right where I left off, sitting on my favorite dirty organ patch with the pitch shifted down an octave, wondering where I’ve been and happy to see me.

I’m gonna grab another beer and get back to my old friend.

there’s a small set of ‘em

It’s probably too soon to write much about it, but it would suck to miss the chance to make the first entry on this date (yeah I know it’s the 3rd already, but I’m sure it’s still legally the 1st until sometime tomorrow morning).

Well, I got the upstairs unpacked. Many species of disc and tape were shelved, egg-crates of cables and widgets got sorted and stacked. The porn stash was relocated. After some thought and trying out a few arrangements, I got the station layout down: racks to my left, the xp-30 to my right, and a desk in front with the juno on the workspace, the 101key in a tray below, and the studio monitors and video monitors sharing the riser in back. Though that last one may take some finagling when the lcds actually get here. The whole rig takes up about 3/4 of the room; I have the back of the desk about two feet from the far wall. I need to work on how move a little closer to center on the other axis, without blocking an inconvenient but needed closet.

When I packed this stuff up to move, I did as much as I could to leave all the woven cable snakes intact; unplug as little as possible, catch as much as possible in the power crate. Pulling it back out now, between time and tangles I’m not having much success just plugging everything right back in, *but*, by following the various cord paths, clumps, and clusters, and picking up my patterns and some clues I left, I was able to snart snapping together some memories of how it all hooked up. I did get the power crate (an egg crate that keeps together three powerstrips of plugs and wall warts and associated cabling, external pieces, etc) cleaned out and reorganized, and all the outgoing power cables re-snaked back to the rack and re-attached to their devices. And I got a good start on running the audio cables, but that’s a bit more complicated and will take a little while.

Meanwhile, I need a new machine to run things. I take the 2Ghz athlon that I was using as a dvr-pc back in the dark days before tivo, swap the 40GB hard drive for a 320 I had laying around. Got XP installed after a few tries (old xp disc didn’t want to see >137 of that drive). Installed Gina (multichannel audio card). Then I go to install the midi card, but find it uses a really old isa connector, no way to plug it into a newer machine (well, no way that’s not more expensive than just replacing the thing). Which is funny because I could have *sworn* I remembered buying a pci card to replace this isa one under similar circumstance. I must be remembering when I had to buy the isa card to replace whatever the hell it was that came before that.

So that’s where I am. I’ve got to figure out what to do about the midi controller, and finish running the audio, and then I should be ready to start turning things on.

so here we go;

sorry I haven’t written much here lately. I have no greater excuse than simply not having been in the right frame of mind.

Well. Don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’m here. And it’s Saturday night, after Christmas. It’s been a decent one. Thursday with the dad, brother, and brother’s family, at Granny’s house, which Dad has now inherited. I think I hit a home run with the Fart Machine I gave my nephew. And another, with a most politically incorrect documentary in which the esteemed civil libertarian boundary-pusher Larry C. Flynt chronicles the accomplishments and exploits of an Alaskan pin-up queen gone rogue. We’ll leave the rest to your imagination or google-fu.

Saturday, pizza, party, and presents with the sister and her husband, which rocked. Never doubt the badassedness of four fresh diced jalapeños and a smattering of mushrooms taking a Digiorno to the next level, especially when you wash it down with a steady flow of a brew-kit bitter and a back supply of the same brew-kit’s dark ale. We backed the food with the Mr. Hankey’s Chrismas Classics dvd, and the beer with Weird Al’s videos dvd, which culminated in the main event of Christmas at Ground Zero. Then to the living room for presents, with Koyaanisqatsi muted, just for the visual, and the TSO playing on on the PC/stereo. Good Times. As far as the gift, my & my sister and I have this long running calendar gag, and I won’t bore you with the details but I think I rocked it this year.

So then today I guess is xmas for me. Cleaned up from the party, then spent the day in lazy, beer-sipping play and exploration. I finally opened up the School of Rock dvd that’s been sitting on my coffee table for months. I can’t tell you how much I love the hell out of that movie. It’s stupid, it’s sappy, but goddamn it it rocks and I love it. Of course I’ve seen it too many hundred thousand times on TBS, so I didn’t need to watch it, but watched it with the commentary from Jack Black and the director, then went back and just watched the “one hell of a rock show” chapter. Man, for a stupid movie song, they nailed it. Just enough Yes, Kiss, Bowie, and Floyd all mixed up and dished out over a plate of AC/DC — fuck yeah. And yes, I fucking cry every time when Turkey Sub struts up to the mike and belts out loud and clear how happy she is to be who she is in a glorious declaration. And though I’ve got my issues with the keyboard kid — I would have liked to have seen a little less Rick Wakeman, a little more Ray Manerik with a helping of Jon Lord (that just would have been more rock and roll to me) — I understand better after the commentary that yeah, Wakeman was probably the perfect archetype given the actor/pianist’s true to life classical upbringing and utter unfamiliarity with rock. And even still I did always like the somewhat-Wakemanesque, but almost more Come Sail Away-era-Denis DeYoung sounding portamento-drenched monotimbral solo he does there. My kinda shit, actually.

Had an awesome dinner (yellow saffron rice, with red onions, fresh jalapeños, and mushrooms, well seasoned and sautéed with a Morningstar Veggie Italian Sausage, if you give a damn), then put on Naqoyqatsi, another dvd I’ve owned for a while but been waiting for the right time to watch. Except that I still haven’t watched it, I’ve just been listening as I typed this post. Well, it *is* Glass, it needs at least one listen by itself without the visual.

And it just ended. Guess I should grab another beer and watch it for real this time.

we needed about three songs before we got our heads around the fact that yes, we were actually here. In the same room with Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen! And he was onstage singing these songs to us.

Yep, that about sums it up. I’m still buzzing from one hell of a fantastic show.

I’m afraid if I don’t post something, then the gears of this software might rust or atrophy or something. So I’ll tell ya that I got a couple of Philip Glass discs for Christmas, including his latest opera Waiting for the Barbarians.

Which is excellent, except it’s funny because for the last month or so I’ve been listening the hell out of Artificial Soldier, the latest album by long time favorites Front Line Assembly, which has a fantastic track called Future Fail, with a chorus that chants “Hail… the barbarians / … / Greet… the barbarians / … “.

So naturally my weird little brain is trying to mash the two together. It really doesn’t work very well.

I lack the discipline to get into weekly theme posts like the “feel good Friday” thing, but Halloween on a Friday calls for some celebrating. Perhaps a double shot, even.

It’s just not Halloween without Danny Elfman:

Or that master songsmith of gothic macabre, Weird Al:

(Sorry I couldn’t find a version where the video didn’t sort of suck or even remotely match the music, but whatever, right?)

Somehow I got this song stuck in my head this morning, so I had to find it and give it a listen.

Last night brought nearly three hours of Henry Rollins doing his uproariously funny spoken-word gig last night. I’d seen the Rollins Band play many moons ago (Lollapalooza ’91, back when the ass-kicking What Am I Doing Here was on my shortlist of favorites), but never had the chance to see him do his spoken word live.

He really is a master storyteller. He has this way of nesting stories-within-stories, three, four, five levels deep, to the point where it almost comes off as rambling — until he starts winding them back, closing each one out in proper reverse order, like nested methods in a piece of program code returning in succession.

With his energy, his intelligence, his curiosity about the world and his willingness to actually put his feet to the pavement — well I’m not going to call him a hero of mine, because I don’t do hero worship. I’ll just say he inspires me to want to be better — to be stronger, more active, more determined, more willing to get my ass off the couch and actually work for the sort of world I want.

Surprisingly he didn’t get too overtly political, at least not as much as he has in some previous material. He took some potshots at McCain for trying to chicken out of the debate, and had a few barbs for Palin, and even did a not-half-bad Bush impersonation in a few places, but it was almost always one-liners and zingers, the real meat being his stories from the road. Of course that road took him into Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Laos, among other places, so the political baggage he brought with him as an American was always certainly an inextricable part of the story.

I can’t begin to relate it all to you, but I do want to share one thing, partly because it really struck me and partly because it was near the end of the show and thus remains freshest on my mind — :)

He was telling us about visiting the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and told us about a conversation with the native who was showing him around. The native told him that his mother had been killed by the regime — she was a teacher, and was executed for being “an intellectual”. And Henry ties it back to how it seems to be the case that nearly every despotic regime makes a priority of taking out the intellectuals.

Something to think about whenever you hear the right wing thugs call someone an “elitist”.

Back when I was just a smart teenage nerd with a budding anti-authoritarian streak, The Manhattan Project, a film a about a teenager who builds an atomic bomb, was a natural and instant favorite. Hell, I eventually even sampled the damn thing:

Chaos Dreary

But of course, whatever real merits the movie may have had, I was also just totally hot for the sexy bad-girl (hey man, she smoked cigarettes and everything!) who partnered up with the deviant genius. I mean, well, she was no Ally Sheedy, but she was absolutely a defining and important celebrity-slash-fictional-character crush

So then it was a weird moment when, maybe a year or so ago, I saw the movie again, and realized — holy shit! That girl went on to become Miranda on “Sex and the City”!

And maybe that was especially weird because I was always uncomfortable with my reaction to Miranda as I watched that show — because while I always found her the most intellectually attractive of the four friends, I never actually found her all that appealing on balance, and I couldn’t place why.

But then tonight I saw her guest starring as the patient in a 2nd season episode of House, and despite the fact that she’s clearly beginning to show her age, I found something very sexy in her once again.

So, I don’t know, maybe it was just something about the Miranda character. Or maybe it was still completely shallow and I just didn’t like her with short hair. I don’t really have any deep analysis of all this prepared, it just seemed like something to write about.