mushinnoshin

More great news for Flatrock:

Coleman Community Center Grand Opening
2:00 p.m., Saturday, May 3

Coleman Park Regional Community Center
384 Thompson Lane
Nashville, TN
Phone: 862-8445

Please join Mayor Karl Dean, Council Lady Anna Page and Metro Parks to celebrate the opening of this new state-of-the-art regional recreation facility.

The $5.5 million facility is an innovative state of the art, community center. Twice the size of previous centers, Coleman will offer a greater diversity of programs and services to meet the growing demands of area residents.

The facility features an indoor pool, a state-of-the art commercial kitchen, gymnasium space, an indoor walking track, computer, music, crafts, fine arts, fitness, and community meeting rooms. Metro Parks’ Master Plan recommends the construction of seven new regional centers.

2 p.m. – Ribbon Cutting Ceremony
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. – Royal Laotian Classical Dancers
2:30 – 5:00 p.m. – Lafayette Mitchell Painting Demonstration
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. – Music City Ballroom Kids demonstrate ballroom dancing

State-of-the art Fitness Room open to the public free-of-charge on May 3.

Awesome, in one night I can give example and counterexample to the ancient question of irony;

it’s not ironic that my knee injury forced me to miss karate tonight.

It is ironic that this leaves me home on a night the television happens to deliver both a show called “Bones”, and Doc Opera about an alcoholic curmudgeon with a bum leg.

I add, “I think I threw my knee out playing piano”.

Got my 2nd Degree Brown Belt today. It was actually pretty late, I should have been there in January, but I had my sabbatical in December which set me back a month, plus another month or two to get back where I was. Still not there really, but enough so to pass.

Anyway, onward.

I so love this line:

We’ll know for the first time
If we’re evil,
or divine;
We’re the Last In Line

I’m not sure what exactly the song is supposed to be about. And that video — which I can only summarize as being something like George A Romero’s interpretation of Orwell’s 1984 [meets a Tim Burton take on a Clockwork Orange (with some strange gratuitous nod to arcade games?)] — doesn’t much clear things up. Still, that line. And that opening scream and sonic thunder as the song takes off around 0:40 — good stuff. [And well, pretty much everything after 2:30 when they come back from the guitar solo. His growl coming back in to the verse and back out through the final chorus {"see how we shine..."} hits a new level of demonic ferocity. No one else has ever really nailed the screaming melody quite like him.]

And yes I’m well aware of how much the song owes to Kashmir. Shut up. I never said Zeppelin didn’t get a few songs right.

You may have heard that Congressman Barney Frank — perhaps the closest thing we’ve got to a sitting left-libertarian and certainly one of the few on the hill with anything resembling honor, or even a basic a grip on right and wrong — has introduced the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2008, to remove federal criminal penalties for small possession and transport.

Naturally I wrote to our Congressman Jim Cooper and asked him to support this no-brainer of a bill. Naturally, he declined. I couldn’t grok from his response whether he hated freedom, opposed bodily autonomy, or just lacked the integrity to do the right thing. Whatever the case, it’s another appalling black mark on his record.

Which makes me sad, because I basically like the guy. He’s right just often enough to be really frustrating how often he’s wrong. But though he may be one of the least offensive of the “Bush Dogs”, he doesn’t make it easy to defend him.

Let’s keep on with the music posts, but make a sharp left hand turn: Howard Jones

I don’t want to overstate the case — I mean he’s not the Art of Noise, or Falco :) — but I always thought highly of him. Loved New Song, liked many of the others. Certainly enough, at least, that I paid attention to an early Keyboard Magazine interview, where he mentioned a practice that struck and stuck with me. He described some program or other mechanism he had that allowed him to color, thicken, and “humanize” his sounds with random subsonic elements that duplicated the main tone at varying detuned pitches.

Now I’m sure that these days you can download some ungodly number of cubase/protools/whatever plugins that accomplish this sort of thing a thousand different ways in ten thousand flavors — and don’t get me wrong, that’s awesome. But I was more taken by — well I don’t know if philosophy, or maybe just aesthetic goal is proper — the very idea of using technology to its fullest, while at the same time subverting it, in the margins where the technology’s imperfections meet our own, in order to make it our own and make it real. Very attractive to a pre-teen hacker wannabe in the process of discovering his real muse. (And not a terribly inaccurate way of describing what I do now at the day job…)

But all that’s sort of a tangent. OK, so Sunday night, Kate and Karsten dropped by to help me smash a champaign bottle across the annual turning of my odometer. Now you’ll have to forgive the fragmented nature of the files my head kept from the night — the drives definitely crashed. Anyway, at some point I introduced them to my rig (and no, that’s not a euphemism), and I seem to remember Kate and I discussing the pros and cons of a mostly outboard setup (eg, sythns, drum machines, effects, etc, all in separate boxes running through a mixer) vs an all-digital/all-virtual system recording inside a studio software suite and/or a program like GarageBand.

And I’m pretty sure I was too wasted to have said anything intelligible about the subject, so let me try again here.

OK, well the thing is first of all I don’t consider it either-or; my boxen fed into a Cakewalk studio, where I would then mix in with digital sounds & samples on the pc. Of course, available quality on the pc side has probably gone up exponentially since then. Knowing this, if forced to choose either/or then I would choose the all virtual path in a second. My setup actually did evolve from such a virtual setup — but Cakewalk for DOS on a 386 only gets you so far, even when you smpte sync to a four track for the live sounds. So I started collecting boxen :)

But by the time I got to a place where I had a reasonable access to both paths — well I’d spent a lot of time sculpting sounds with the tech I had. And one of the things that I came to believe is that every physical thing which touches your sound — changes it. Every wire, chip, jack, cable, diode… every single thing changes the sound, in the unique, if maybe or almost imperceptible way that a unique object can and must.

Two synths of the same make and model made to the same specifications playing the same note programmed to the exact same settings will not sound the same. Maybe not so much that you can hear it, but absolutely enough that when they combine, they make a thicker, more imperfect sound than merely playing simultaneous digital copies of the same .wav from the same source.

In the end I found that most music produced within and from a single homogeneous environment sounded to me like it had a certain “sameness” to it. Almost like a technical frame I could always see wrapped around the sound. Which is very good, for many purposes. But it’s not punk rock. I wanted to try and punch through the walls of those frames. More real world components equals more chaos, more entropy — more noise, and more humanity — to channel back into the sound. More imperfection.

Then again, the computers really are much more powerful now..

Well the most important thing I think is that I got all the way through the Howard Jones post without saying anything about “No One Is To Blame”. I suppose that’s probably a good thing…

This isn’t so much a fully formed thought as a reminder to myself to fully form one –

From a discussion on the LPTN list: their candidate for House 58 posts a press release basically in favor of letting the racetrack @ the Fairgrounds do whatever the hell it wants, whenever the hell it wants. I of course am of the opposing opinion, and pointed to a group that’s trying to start a dialog about some more productive and universally beneficial use of this public property.

Anyway I think it could help to have ideas on the table about where the track might go; there are people who enjoy auto racing, and they have their right to it. So I’ll throw one out there — what about Union Hill? Work with or merge it with the drag racing track. Don’t make me drag out words like synergy. I get the impression both organizations could use some of that. And gas ain’t* getting cheaper.

* Is that the sort of artificial colloquial pandering our leaders are supposed to drivel out in order to show they aren’t “elitist”?

From Chris Lugo:

Well, about six of us peace activist lefties showed up tonight at nine pm at the main post office on royal parkway. The traffic line to the post office went back about a half a mile so we had to wait in line about fifteen minutes to find a parking space. One of our people had called up earlier and told us that one of our people was there already and that there a lot of libertarians there since 6pm. We saw Daniel and Lisa, Libertarian candidates, waiting at the bus stop to go home as we showed up.

Once we found a parking spot we got together and strategized about where the best place to protest was. Nini had spent the night before making a very nice sign that detailed how much of our tax dollars go to military spending. So our focus went to where all the news cameras were, near a tent set up along the route the cars were taking to drop off their returns. So we went toward the tent and I suggested we go to the other side of the tent just past where people drop off their taxes.

So we went there, the three of us, and shortly thereafter two more people showed up. So Nini and I were standing on the curb just past this tent and were holding signs protesting the abusive use of our tax dollars for an illegal war and Jane was trying to hand out flyers that she had made for the event. Just up ahead of us was this tent that was sponsored by 107.5 the River, a private media corporation, that was handing out pizza and candy to people as they drove by. Then as they went past us Jane was handing them flyers.

So within just one or two minutes there were several people who did not identify themselves but told us that we couldn’t stand there. We were standing on a sidewalk. They said that we have to go across the street. We said that this is public property and it is our first amendment right to stand here. They said that this was not true and if we did not move they would go get the police. So they came back about a minute later with this police officer, Troy Smith, of the Metro Police Department. He told us we had to go across the street where there was no illumination and no one was driving by. He said we did not have a right to stand there and hold signs or hand flyers to people. He said that this was federal property and that we do not have the right to be there.

We pointed out that we were standing on a public sidewalk and we have a right to be there. We told him that the constitution guarantees our first amendment right to free speech. He threated to arrest us and said he would charge us with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. He asked for Jane’s ID. He asked for my ID. His language was threatening and intimidating. He said about five times that we had to go across the street. Jane was talking to him and trying to stall him. Jane was pointing out that this radio station, a private corporation, was in the same spot we were and they were handing out pizza. The police officer and the security people said that was diferent because pizza isn’t information and they weren’t protesting anything so they could be there. We pointed out that they were using the opportunity to advertise their radio station and why didn’t they have to move. Jane said she wouldn’t move unless they had to move.

It was getting very close to arrest territory, I have seen people getting arrested before, and I wasn’t prepared for being arrested at this time even though I knew we were in the right. So I was preparing to leave and I think we persuaded Jane to leave for the time being.

So we went down the street a couple of blocks, addled and agitated by this show of intimidation. We handed out flyers about halfway down the traffic line where all the people were stuck in traffic and no one bothered us but we also had been chased away from the television cameras as well.

After a while we went back to the spot where we had been intimidated and harrassed before and talked to the news trucks to tell them what had happened. Then most of the group went across the street and stayed until around 10:30pm or so, while there was still a line a half a mile back with people waiting to drop off their tax returns.

So here is my feeling – there is a clear case here for a lawsuit. There was a private group obviously benefing from the free publicity they were getting being in the same spot we chose to be in. We were told we couldn’t exercise our first amendment rights on a sidewalk on public property, but that a private corporation could do that. When we stood up to defend our rights we were threated with arrest. So I think we have a case here. We have at least five witnesses, as well as the officer’s name. I couldn’t get the name of the other people who were harrasing us but I think we can get them. We have the name of the radio station that was there at the same spot we were at and we have several accounts of the language which was used against us that clearly stated that we did not have a right as citizens to exercise our first amendment rights on public property but that a private corporation could.

Chris

Well clearly all that “right of the people to peaceably assemble” first amendment nonsense doesn’t cover people assembling for peace! What were they thinking?

(because you know you like it)

OK. No more metal for now. Tonight, abacab makes a soothing soundtrack to a cup or three of tea and a reasonable bedtime.

And an early rise, to unload that tea. It’s win win, really.