Month: December 2018

Austin, TX I’ve been working on this, on and off, for almost a month so I thought I’d share my progress before I put it away for a while. It’s a cover of Genesis’ “Afterglow”, one of their more lush and romantic songs, pure Tony Banks. It builds up to this huge ending, so it was their closer for live shows for over a decade. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s the original: It’s sort of a go-to for me to play on piano since it’s both easy (a must for me) and, I think, quite beautiful. One night, I think Nicole was at work, I was just playing it very slowly, with one chord per bar and no movement beyond that. I thought “Huh. This would make a really nice, sparse, glitchy, electronic thing and I bet I could do that.” So that’s what I’ve been doing. The performance of the parts was actually pretty straightforward. I know the song pretty well, and I had a clear idea of what I wanted. All of the chords hitting on the first beat a piano, albeit piano being clobbered by weird delays and stuff. The parts that were originally guitar parts are very thin synths. I did add a couple of real guitar tracks (only one is recognizable, I think), the rest is all synths and effects. Here’s what I have so far: I’m putting it away for a while because I’ve been messing with it for so long that I’m not really hearing it anymore. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to rip a lot of it out because it’s busier than I really want it to be, but I’m not sure what to remove. It’s not quite as “minimalist” as I’d like, but it’s not too far off, I don’t think. So, this is anywhere from 70-90% done, depending on what I decide to change when I come back in a couple of months. It’s…not quite what I imagined when I got started, but it’s a good deal closer than I thought I’d be able to get, if that makes any sense. If you’re in to this sort of thing, enjoy! If not, then….endure? -RK P.S. The mix is stereo, but I’ll be honest, there’s a lot of guesswork involved as I am functionally deaf in one ear. The meters say there’s some interesting separation, but I have to take their word for it.

Austin, TX I finished reading Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind this evening, just in time for me to list it as the best book I read in 2018. It’s been a strange year from a reading standpoint. There of the standouts for me have been in the non-fiction category: How To Change Your Mind, Why We Sleep, and Other Minds. I don’t recall my favorites being quite so lopsided in this regard in the past, but there you have it. It was a good year for reading about brains, I suppose. Back to Pollan’s book, because I really cannot recommend this one enough. Not only have I never used psychedelics, but I came to this book almost completely ignorant of their history and the research that’s been done to figure out how they work and if they can serve a therapeutic purpose. If you’re already pretty well versed in these things, then I don’t know that it will be as thrilling for you, but I wouldn’t rule it out. My therapist is reading it for the third time and I suspect she’s not unfamiliar with some of the contents. The first section of the book discusses the history of these molecules, starting with Albert Hoffman and his accidental discovery. Within ten years or so, psilocybin was also introduced to the U.S. (at tremendous cost to the woman who let us in on the secret). At the time, psychedelics were not only legal but even somewhat respectable. A tremendous backlash, the blame for which Pollan lays squarely at the feet of one Dr. Leary, caused the cessation of psychedelic studies until the 1990s when they started to make a return to the “legitimate” medical community. The middle section describes the author’s own experiences with psychedelics, which he hadn’t tried prior to his 60s. He details how he navigated the underground community and had the opportunity to try LSD, psilocybin, and 5-MeO DMT (“the toad”).He details his trips in about as engaging a fashion as one likely can, but nonetheless, they’re still descriptions of someone else’s drug experiences. I found this section the weakest of the book, but nonetheless you couldn’t write this book without this telling these stories. The final section concerns current research and goes into detail describing studies using psychedelics to treat the terminally ill, the addicted and the depressed. The results of the tests are cause for cautious optimism. The terminally ill aren’t cured, but their quality of life over their remaining months can apparently be markedly improved by treatments including these drugs. Of course, you can’t just give someone LSD and cure their smoking habit. That’s where it gets weird and it explains why scientific trials are so difficult. It’s not the drugs that help so much as the experience you have while on them. That means, for it work, you have a guide, and a setting, and you discuss intentions, and all kinds of quasi-shamanic stuff. It is really odd, and odd in a way that science struggles with. For me, a person who’s never tried anything like this, I found the entire book fascinating. There’s so much history and science to go along with the drug talk that I felt like I was learning new things on every page. It helps that Pollan is both skeptical and grounded, so he doesn’t come across as someone advocating for people to go out and start shoving mushrooms down their gullets. He’s also a fine writer, which always helps when you’re writing a book. The only thing that pisses me off, and it’s a big one, is this: These treatments would seem to be exactly what a couple of friends of mine, dear friends, could have used. It’s too late for them, and of course, I can’t know that treatment involving psychedelic drugs would have made any difference, but it might have, and that’s made it hard to sleep these last couple of nights. Anyway, it’s a great book. It’s one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read and I would recommend to it pretty much anyone who has any curiosity about the mind and consciousness, or really any curiosity at all. -RK

Austin, TX A few years back, I decided that I was giving up the fight on “begging the question.” I know the correct use of the term, but it’s almost never used that way. Usage changes, and at some point you go from being “correct” to being “a pedantic asshole”, and that’s the time to give it up. I may not use “begs the question” to mean “raises the question” but realistically, that’s what it means now and that fight is over. This year, I’m giving up on the goatee. The word “goatee” is usually used to describe any beard without sideburns. In ye olden days, that’s not what it meant: FWIW, I think he looks quite dashing with that Van Dyke. I decided to give this one up while reading a thread on Twitter discussing which celebrities should and should not wear goatees. Properly speaking, none of them had goatees, but who cares? Everyone knew what they meant. Usage changes. As P.J. Fry once said: “Time makes fools of us all.” Henceforth, they’re all goatees. It was a dumb thing to take a stand about, wasn’t it? I should make this a new Christmas tradition: Give up being a pedantic dork about terms that don’t mean what they used to mean, or maybe they do, but no one uses them that way and who cares anyway? I like that. Let’s circle back on that next year. The new Lil Jon song featuring the Kool Aid Man is all the rage this year, and with good reason; it’s one of the best Christmas songs I’ve ever heard. There’s probably no better hype man for Lil Jon than the Kool Aid Man, and the song just confirms to me that Lil Jon is one of the chillest dudes out there. Searching for other songs to put on the mix this year, I came across this gem by Slade. You may know them as the band who did the original (and vastly superior) versions of every Quiet Riot single. They’re also the best-dressed band of the seventies, if you’re into glam-meets-hard-rock-by-way-of-English-thrift-shops (and honestly, who isn’t?). I know it’s probably too late to add it to your rotation this year, but keep it in mind. You’ll be the coolest holiday DJ, especially if you’re showing the videos as well: Here’s a video my wife put together featuring some highlights from our 2018. She’s awfully good at putting these things together and I wanted to share it with all 16 of you who are likely to see it. Happy whichever holiday you chose to celebrate. I hope you get what you want out of this winter, and that you’re happy and safe. -RK (If the video doesn’t play, you’ll want to pop it out into another window. Something to do with third-party cookies and Google Drive.)

Austin, TX These sunny, 70-ish days seriously lack the sort of atmospherics that put one in a holiday mood, don’t they? Fortunately, the fact that I have a few days off more than makes up for that. The middle of March would feel like a holiday with enough time off, wouldn’t it? Maybe I’ll test that theory this year. I’m in bed, watching a bunch of kids on those motorized scooters that have been irresponsibly dumped on our streets in the middle of the night before the city could get around to making a law that would prohibit that sort of thing. That’s the business model of the disruptive startup, isn’t it? Do something that could/should/would be against the law and try to make it ubiquitous before anyone can do anything about it. Not that it would make any difference if the city were to pass laws against the cursed things; the state is thoroughly in the pocket of Uber and their ilk and will not hesitate to overrule any local ordinances that might hurt their business. Yay democracy. My experiment with the social network Vero is being put on hold until they get a user base that’s more useful to me. It wouldn’t hurt if they were to get a little less text-phobic. I can’t say anything on their site without first uploading an image or linking a song or video or, almost-ironically enough, a book. I can do that, sure, and I guess it fits the site’s aesthetic better if people aren’t treating it like Twitter, but it just seems kind of obtuse to discourage what I consider a key feature of social networking. Oh, and they could maybe stop trying to get me to follow Zack Snyder every time I log in. That would be nice. So, anyway, back to trying to find a place that fills void caused by what feels like an eventually-inevitable departure from Facebook. Does it even need a replacement? Mmmmmaybe? I don’t know, but I’m not quite sure what the shape of that thing would be. It’s not shaped like Vero, for what that’s worth. Maybe Twitter plus keeping a blog is enough. It feels a little light to me, but that’s not an entirely unappealing thought. Much of the holiday rigmarole is in the rear view mirror. Gifts and cards were launched into the ether, I saw my mother and sister last weekend, so it’s mostly a countdown at this point. We’re hunkered down here in the apartment doing amazing things with crafts and music and…OK, we’re playing a lot of video games. Is that what you wanted to hear? Job #2 is going well right now, thank you very much. I’m in a weekly rhythm with it that’s working well for me and I think I’m doing a better job at it each week. Sure, it would be nice if the pay amounted to anything, but it’s one of those (and I canNOT believe I’m saying this) resume-builders that’s also a lot of fun for me, so I intend to keep at it and see if it goes anywhere (which is probably will not). My big goal for the holiday is to finish the song I’m working on, or at the very least get all of the tracks on the laptop so I finish it there. I’ve only recently discovered the concept of “parameter modulation” in the effects section, which puts things into a semi-modular kind of territory that is ….wait, are there words I’m using even real words? They are, and there’s a real chance I’m using them correctly, but let me just say that there are some new toys in Reaper that I’m super-eager to play with because I think they’ll give me something very close to what I was imagining when I started this project. One thing that living on the fourth floor, as opposed to the ground floor, offers us is the opportunity to leave the windows open at night. It is getting properly chilling in the deep parts of the night, which makes blankets feel that much better. It’s not like camping, but it does give the nights something of a “vacation bungalow” feeling sometimes. We both sleep better with the windows open, at least in the winter when the allergen-producing plants have the decency to keep it to themselves. There’s a full moon out there somewhere. I can’t see it, but I can see the shadows it’s casting. It’s a good night for sleeping, so I think I’ll do some of that now. -RK

Denton, TX ‘Tis the season of social obligations, isn’t it? They’re not all wanted, not all unwanted, but they undoubtedly “are”. Five in four days is a bit much, but it represents the killing of many birds with as few stones as possible. I’m staying with my mother tonight at my aunt’s house deep in a suburban labyrinth. I have reliable navigation skills, but trying to find my way through these identical houses on identical streets surrounded by identical everything is more than I can manage after spending a good chunk of the day on the road. I’m here, but I can’t distinguish “here” from anywhere else nearby. I’m currently putting off going to sleep, which will occur on a twin bed that’s almost as tall as it is long. It’s weird. Anyway, I’m not dreading any of these events, but I’m looking forward to having them behind me, if you know what I mean. Driving up here, I got to wondering just how often I’d made this four hour-ish trek over my lifetime. Somewhere between 75-100 times, I’d guess. That’s an awful lot of time and distance on a stretch of road that is dull, subject to construction delays, and absolutely unavoidable as there are simple no other reasonable routes between points “A” and “B”. I did see a structure that looked sort of like the beginnings of a reconstruction of Wardenclyffe.. Actually….let me look it up real quick… Holy smokes! That’s pretty much exactly what it is. Perhaps I’ve been a little too quick to judge this drive as being dull. There are/were numerous curious features. The late, lamented Starship Pegasus is no more, but the Monolithic Dome Institute remains. And, of course, there’s the semi-famous Waco Memorial Funeral Home: Sure are a lot of round/dome-related things on that stretch of highway, huh? I’ve done this drive so many times it’s like I’m not seeing it anymore. I almost wish I could forget the whole trip and see it with fresh eyes so I could appreciate it’s special-ness. And on that note, off to bed. G’night all. -RK

I’m perhaps a quarter of the way through Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind. It’s been an engrossing read thus far, but one of the things that I’m finding most interesting is that it brings some of my favorite comics into a whole new context. Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles is pretty obviously referencing some of the same experiences Pollan writes about, but it’s not like Morrison was ever coy about his influences. I suppose I always knew that Warren Ellis’ Planetary issue #21 was covering this territory, but I hadn’t recognized just how specific it was. On an unrelated note, I’m currently working on absolutely mangling one of my favorite old Genesis songs. I’m not putting that way to be self-deprecating; “mangling” is a literal description of what I’m doing to the poor, helpless tune. It’s a simple, lush, and sentimental song and I’m trying to make it cold, distant, and mechanical and…I think it’s working? I dunno. We’ll know more in a week or two. This has been the most fun, and most challenging thing I’ve worked on from a production standpoint. I’m still a complete newb when it comes to recording music. I’m not at all familiar with the tools, and the learning curve is steep. It’s like trying to express ideas with an extremely limited vocabulary. It’s difficult, but the fact that it forces you to be creative is rewarding. Today’s fun? Recording the drum parts as separate parts when there’s only one audio output on the machine. It worked, but I bet there are better ways to do it. My brain feels reasonably bright and well-functioning right now, which would normally be an unreservedly good thing. But…I’m not a winter person, and the time between Thanksgiving and New Year gets my anxiety cooking. In some ways, a dull mind would probably be preferable, huh? Anyway, it’s going to be a busy, busy next couple of weeks or so. I’m going to go to parties. Plural. More than one. I’ll be among friends, or at the very least pleasant acquaintances, so it won’t be bad, but Mr. Brain isn’t having it. I should probably stab it with a Q-Tip or something. We moved out of our last apartment complex in no small part because of the constant construction and repairs. What is the point of having a view of a pond when there’s scaffolding over your windows for over a year? Not that we could see the scaffolding, since there was also a plastic sheet of unknown purpose over the window as well. I say “unknown purpose” since it didn’t prevent paint or stucco from getting on the glass, nor did it prevent rain from getting inside. Because we like the neighborhood, we didn’t move far. In fact, we only moved across a small service road from the old place. Can you guess where this is going? I bet you can! The construction at our old complex has moved from the building where our old apartment was to the one that is directly outside of our windows. So now, we see nothing but scaffolding and we hear hammering and drilling and the unmistakable beep beep beep for trucks backing up all day long. In retrospect, perhaps we should have considered moving more than 50 yards away? We do like the neighborhood, and the view is lovely when the scaffolding is down. I am saddened to report that the Vero experiment is not going particularly well. Ello was positively lively in comparison. They have a nice interface, but if I wanted to simply post things for my own benefit without any expectation that anyone would ever see them, I might as well just have a blog, right? -RK

(unnecessary note: I wrote this last night, but I’m pushing it today because I want to try something and it’s easier to test during the day. I’m sure you needed to know that….)I picked up a copy of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman knowing nothing more about the novel or novelist than that the book had been name-checked in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. One of the characters refers to it as “…one of the greatest books in the English language.” That’s a hell of a claim, even coming from a fictional character (and one of dubious character at that), so I figured it was worth a read. It was, in fact, worth a read. It’s a comedy that I’ve seen described as “sardonic”, which is the sort of funny that doesn’t make you laugh, so that’s a pretty good description. It is genuinely funny; it’s just a little on the grim side in its humor. It’s a difficult book to describe without spoilers since there’s a big twist near the end. It’s the sort of twist that was a lot more novel back in it’s day (O’Brien wrote it in 1940) but might be a little more transparent to modern readers. Still, no need to spoil it, right? The language is lovely, and the condemnation of aspects of modernity still hit home. It’s absurd in a (and I hate myself for using this term) Kafka-esque fashion, so if that’s up your alley, I strongly, strongly recommend The Third Policeman to you. It’s short, but fairly dense, so it’s not a breezy read. As someone who has read The Invisibles a couple of hundred times, this adds a little flavor to the overall experience…and I’m not going to go into any more detail than that. Read it for yourself. While we’re on the subject of funny novels, I wanted to list some of the books that I’ve found particularly amusing. It seems like writing a “funny” novel is really, really hard since so few writers have the knack. So, on the off chance you’re looking for some written drollery, these might scratch that itch: Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – This is at the top of the list for a reason. It’s the funniest novel I’ve ever read, combining the sensibilities of two of the titans of the field. Not all supergroups work, but this one produced a classic. Honestly, the entire Discworld series belongs on this list, too. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole – This was one of those classics I’d avoided because I didn’t really know anything about it other than that they made you read it in school. It’s genuinely laugh out loud funny and I’m ticked off that I took so long to get to it. Lamb, Christopher Moore Any Jeeves book, P.G. Wodehouse Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis Redshirts, John Scalzi The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams That’s not a complete list, of course, but if you work your way through these books, you’ll probably been in a pretty good mood. The fact that I don’t list The Master and Margarita on here is more of a personal failing than an indictment of the book. It didn’t work for me, but it did for many, many people, so I’m just going to assume the problem is on this end.

I cheated a little bit and read some of my current “public transit” book while I was taking a bath tonight and I had a very “me” sort of epiphany: Not all books are best read when riding a train. The Third Policeman is narrowly regarded* as an absolute masterpiece and one of the funniest books ever published. As I’m still reading it, I can’t tell you if I agree with these assessments or not, but what I can tell you is this: It is considerably funnier when reading without any distractions. I wonder if this effect contributes to my being less impressed with The Master and Margarita that I expected to be. Many people whose opinions I respect regard it as one of the greatest novels ever written, but it left me a little underwhelmed. I’m willing to admit that the problem is probably with me and not the book. Perhaps the issue was not with what I read, but how and where I read it. TIL why producers really prefer their drum machines to have separate outs for each drum. Again, probably obvious to most people who’ve encountered the situation, but I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes. My experiment with Vero is not going particularly well. I like the interface well enough, but the fact that you cannot post just text. You have 8 options as to what you’d like to post: You can add text to any of the above, but if you just want to saw something, you have to type it over the cover of a book or an image or something. That’s not a deal breaker, but it’s a curious design decision. The bigger problem is that none of the people who I am currently following have posted anything in the last 6 months (or longer). The site still has frequent issues with their servers being unable to handle the load of new users, but based on my experience, I’m pretty much just posting for my own benefit. I guess that’s about it for now, seeing as it is getting unreasonably late. I’ll try to think of something good as I’m dropping off to sleep. It’s a little thing, but I’ve found it helps me sleep a little better. Anything to take the sting out of these strange, worrisome times. -RK * Things are often described as “widely regarded” so I assume that they can be “narrowly regarded” as well. I’m improvising here, but I take “narrowly regarded” to mean “adjudged as so by a small but extremely enthusiastic audience.” A minority opinion, but in this case, a minority comprised of people I respect.

Let’s start with something good tonight. Last night, we made some country-style ribs, which are not especially rib-y, but they’re cheap and super-flavorful when cooked patiently. There’s a lot of fat, and the meat isn’t especially tender, so country-style ribs are the poster children for “low and slow”. Unfortunately, the recipe we tried last night, while aces in the flavor department, was a little to low, leaving us with grey, fatty chunklets of meat that we had no desire to eat. So, we went to the pub instead. But we did save the ribs. For lunch today, we went downstairs and finished them on a grill and…yes, this is how you want to do country-style ribs. Cooking them the previous night left them tender, or at least as tender as they get, and the grill did all kinds of good things with the fatty bits and the sauce.* Hell of a rescue of what looked like a lost cause. Speaking of lost causes, there was some good news and some bad news regarding my ongoing skin thing. On the bad side, yet another infection had taken hold so I am back on antibiotics. Hooray, compromised immune system! This isn’t new, but it also isn’t a great deal of fun and it puts one in a foul mood when you see the first symptoms and you know that the next week or two are going to be pretty lousy. However, the doctor thinks she may have come up with a good treatment. There’s a very, very new biological that is custom made for skin ailments but, unlike the others of its ilk, it doesn’t suppress the immune system. She has one other patient using this treatment and it completely cleared up their skin. There is some hope to be had there. However, you can’t simply prescribe this. I had to fill out an application, as did my doctor, and we’ll have to wait and see what the drug company and my insurance company will allow. I assume that this drug is expensive, which means that my insurance company may say “no”. We’ll know when we know, I guess. I remember when Google+ launched that the pitch was essentially “It’s like Facebook, but not Facebook.” At the time, that seemed like a reasonable thing to want from a social network. Years later, I’ve come to the conclusion that “like Facebook” isn’t what I want at all. I don’t want ads served up in a feed, or an opaque algorithm determining what it thinks I want to see. There are quite a few options out there with a variety of feature sets; surely one is a good fit. That’s a long way of saying that I’m giving the new-ish social network Vero a shot. It’s an odd little thing, in that it runs only on mobile devices and there’s no posting just text. You post links, or images, or music, or things like that, although you can add text to the post. It’s pretty sparsely populated, at least by people I know or want to follow, which is both a feature and a bug in my reckoning. I like the idea of a non-pervasive network, which means that if they get to big, I’ll have to rethink it. The fact that it’s mobile device-only seems weird at first, but I kind of like the fact that I won’t be obsessively checking it while I’m working on a proper computer. I feel like I’d be more in control of how I use it. So, we’ll see. It’s a pretty enough interface and they say the right things regarding privacy and data protection. I’m not not certain that this is the shape of a network that I want. I’ll keep you posted as events warrant. -RK * What kind of sauce should you use? Any kind you like! I have my favorites, but really, it’s about whatever flavor profile you prefer. I will say this, though: To take advantage of the high-heat grill, you really want something with a high enough sugar content to caramelize.