Author: Ridley

Have you ever read a book that kept you turning the pages mostly because you wanted to finish it so you could talk and write about it? I stole my own thunder by writing a short review of Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts – A Fiction on Goodreads without realizing that it would cross-post to Facebook. Oops. Here it is, because it’s a good start to what I want to talk about:
 

Damned if I know. The disturbingly precise use of language, the fact that it’s almost certainly not a fiction in any accepted sense of the word, and recursive nature of the images that collapse into a heap by the end…this is one of those cases where I can recognize brilliance without completely comprehending it. That’s a lot for a book that clocks in at 120 or so pages. I get the sense that I would benefit from reading this book multiple times; there’s a circularity to it that Grant Morrison would admire.

That’s all true, but it fails to capture what it’s like to read this truly odd book. When I read Naked Lunch, it didn’t strike me as truly odd as Murnane’s book. It was weird, sure, but it was weird in an messy, disorganized way. Border Districts – A Fiction is on the other end of the spectrum. Take this passage for example:

“Today, while I was writing the previous paragraphs, I seemed to arrive at my own explanation for the intimacy between a reading boy and a remembering man on the one hand and on the other hand a female personage brought into being by passages of fiction. (I do not consider the boy and the man fictional characters. I am not writing a work of fiction but a report of seemingly fictional matters.)”

There are hundreds more like it, self-referential to a dizzying degree. He refers to previous paragraphs constantly, and images recur in different contexts throughout its entirety. Murnane doesn’t have stylistic tics; he has stylistic spasms. You will probably never see the term “so-called” used so often in a book of any length. 

Oh, I guess I should talk about what the book is about, huh? Ostensibly, it’s about a man who moves from the capital to a small town on the border of a neighboring state, and he spends the entire novel describing his memories. What it’s really about is Murnane ruminating over mental images. He considers their origins, their accuracy, their persistence, and how they will overlay one another, so that the mental image of one thing can be the image of something else slightly modified to suit the new thing or idea. 

Which is to say, it’s pretty abstract. So, you have a writer who discusses abstractions with incredibly precise language. Try to imagine Bertrand Russell and Cormac McCarthy co-authoring a book in a “things you might see in a small Australian town” and you’re not too far from it. It’s genuinely fascinating, even when it’s not always a sprightly read, and I suspect it’s a better book than I have the ability to appreciate. 

-RK

Note: There are linked videos of BattleBots fights in this post. They are all from last season. There are no spoilers for the upcoming season, which will be on the Discovery and Science Channels this starting this May.

Some vacations are about visiting friends and family. Others are about going places you’ve never been, taking in the scenery, the food, the feel and the air of a distant city. Still others are just about getting away from everything and taking a break from a routine.

This vacation was not about any of those things. This vacation was about watching robots kick the ever-loving crap out of each other. It was about fire, and noise, and saws, and hammers, and mower blades.

This vacation was about BattleBots.

Warhead vs. Complete Control in what I regard as the greatest fight in the history of all fighting sports. I am biased.

Nicole introduced me to BattleBots a year or two ago and I was instantly hooked. It has far more violence than any sport I’ve seen, but no one gets hurt. It rewards tactical thinking, the ability to design, the skill to build, and the quickness of wit to face a foe bent on the destruction of your bot. In a better world, it would be more popular than any other sport.

So, when Nicole saw that tickets were on sale for the taping of season 3 (or 6, or 7…BattleBots has a difficult history), it was a no-brainer to grab a pair to the final frickin’ show. This was one of those items you don’t realize is on your bucket list until the opportunity presents itself.

Hypershock vs. Warrior Clan. Please marvel at Hypershock’s non-traditional choice of weapons.

We looked at the timing and the finances and decided that, rather than make a vacation out of it, we would make this trip a short one and focus on the single event rather than trying to “see L.A.” We flew in Saturday evening and we’re on our way home on right now (“right now” being 8:00 AM Monday morning; I’ll be posting this later as the idea of buying in-flight Wi-Fi by the hour does not appeal).

The upshot is that we have very little to report from a tourist standpoint as we spent most of our time near our hotel (near LAX and Inglewood) and in the part of Long Beach that doesn’t show up in the brochures (unless those brochures are for things like “shipping containers” and “small commercial airports”). Mostly, we saw a lot of the 405, which looks a good deal like other freeways.

Chomp vs. Captain Shrederator. The Captain’s builder expressed disdain for Chomp prior to this fight, calling the bot “over-engineered.” 

Food-wise, we decided to try a well-reviewed Mexican joint within walking distance of the hotel called Casa Gamino. If you’re from Texas, I would advise you to avoid this. The food was plentiful, but bland does not begin to describe. Wait, that’s not true. “Bland” is a exceedingly accurate description of the chiles rellenos and red chile plate.

Lunch the next day was more successful but not without a little difficulty. We tried a place called Panang Thai, literally next to the hotel, which shares a building with a Thai massage place and an aquarium. The food wasn’t spicy, but it was flavorful, well-prepared, and plentiful to a fault. The appetizers were entire meals on their own, and, due to what I hope was a language problem, I was served a bowl of chicken curry instead of the Thai fried rice with chicken I’d ordered. Or, we thought it was “instead of,” as ten minutes later, it turned into “in addition to” a plate of beef fried rice.

Then, it was time for the main event: BattleBots! We drove to a hanger in Long Beach and, through some unlikely bit of luck, found ourselves in the front of the line for the group filling one side of the arena. I got some serious chills when we walked in and saw the set for the first time. We picked out an optimal spot and then we waited.

Minotaur vs. Warhead in a battle of two of the most outrageous powerful weapons in the tournament.

If you’ve ever been to this sort of an event, you already know that there’s a good deal of waiting involved. Carting the bots into the arena, cleaning up after a particularly vicious fight, getting the announcers and the judges into places, doing alternate takes (of which there were surprisingly few; the entire crew were pros at this), but it was all worth it.

I’m afraid I can’t discuss the content of the battles until after these episodes air, but I can tell you this: It was worth it. Television does a great job of capturing the violence of these fights, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The sounds inside the building are much louder than they seem on TV, and when something unexpected and incredible happens, everyone in the building laughs and screams even the old pros seem to be delighted by the spectacle. There was one moment in particular; you’ll know it when you see it, that had everyone from the stage crew to the other teams to the on-screen talent lining up to take photos.

After a generous number of undercard fights, we finally got to the final. Obviously, I can’t say anything specific, but what I can say is that you’ll want to see it. Last year’s final, a battle between Tombstone and Bombshell, was a bit of a dud and was over quickly without much in the way of spectacular action. That is not the case with the final this year.

Tombstone won the tournament last year. This is not the final because the final wasn’t very good. Most fights against Tombstone are not very good. Ask Counter Revolution.

We had an absolute blast. Would we do it again? Of course! My voice is absolutely shot and we must have sweated off half a dozen pounds over the course of the evening. One of the most fun, ridiculous things we’ve done. 

But who won?

Looks like it was me!

-RK

It took me a little over two months to read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. That even longer than I needed to finish Thomas Pynchon’s 1,185 page Against The Day.  Jacobs’ book is less than half that length, but what it lacks in sheer pages it makes up for in textbooky-ness. That makes it, as one Goodreads reviewer noted, “…easy to put down.”

It was also one of the most informative books I’ve ever read. I’ve developed strong opinions regarding how cities ought to be planned without ever bothering to learn anything about how they actually are planned. That wasn’t an acceptable state of affairs, so I tracked down the consensus pick for the best book on city planning and this one is, by most accounts, the place to start.

The Death and Life of Great American Cites was first published in 1961 and, while it certainly shows its age in some of the details, it remains a remarkably forward-looking book. Jacobs’ central thesis is that most city planning misses the mark because the prevalent theories are concerned with how cities ought to be as opposed to looking what actually works in existing cities and working out why it works and attempting to replicate it.

Jacobs makes no attempt to disguise her disdain for the three prevailing paradigms of her day: The Garden City, the Radiant City, and the City Beautiful. In her telling, the Garden City’s primary impact on urban planning was the urge to put as much green space in cities as possible and to minimize the number of streets. The Radiant City (and again, this is Jacobs version of it) is also concerned with minimize the footprint of streets and building tall, inward-facing buildings to maximize the efficiency of land use. The City Beautiful focuses on creating districts apart from the rest of the city concentrating all of the cultural centers and monuments in one location.

She sees all of these as profoundly wrong-headed as they compartmentalize the city, segregating districts and neighborhoods in the interests of efficient and rational organization. Instead, she espouses diversity in all of its messy, difficult to replicate glory. Jacobs’ four drivers for generating diversity are:

1.  A mixture of primary uses (to ensure that there are reasons for a variety of people to be in the area at different times of the day).

2. Small city blocks (to allow the free flow of foot and vehicle traffic allowing areas to knit together with nearby districts).

3. A mixture in ages of buildings (to ensure both a mixture of uses so the area doesn’t become monochromatic and a mixture of prices to allow new and innovative uses of the area).

4. Sufficient density of people in the area (to support businesses and housing, meaning that the district has to continue to appeal to residents as their circumstances improve).

Jacobs gives entire chapters to almost every imaginable aspect of her proposals. I won’t go into detail, but she most certainly does. She’s incredibly thorough in laying out her argument and does so primarily by use of anecdote and not a little bit of old-fashioned lecturing. She gives the impression that she knows both her sources and the numbers behind her statements thoroughly,  but there’s very little of either of these in the book itself.

If it sounds like I have mixed feelings about this book, then I’m accurately expressing my feelings toward it. I’ve been looking at the structure of cities differently while reading it, and I now how some theoretical framework on which to hang my ideas about how cities should be planned. When I see something that appears to be working, I have a better idea as to why this should be so. The book did what it set out to do, and it did so better than I expected and the vast majority of what she has to say holds up over 50 years later.

If you’re even a little interested in city planning, it’s worth the effort to read The Death and Live of Great American Cities. Just be forewarned that it will be an effort.

-RK

Periodic reminder to creative type folks to back up and save their work

— Fred G. Yost 🖊🐺 (@waidr) March 29, 2018

As it turns out, this is good advice for all types, creative and otherwise. It is especially good advice with regards to things which are irreplaceable and things which hadn’t occurred to you to back up.  Obviously, I’m not speaking in hypotheticals here and the worst part is, I had a warning of sorts just last week.

I will always have a special place in my heart for the Korg DW 8000 synthesizer. It’s the one I lusted for in high school and I’ve owned probably a half dozen of them over the years. The one I have now has been with me for over a decade so I’ve had a chance to really dial in the settings and get the sounds just right. 

I took it in to Switched On last week to get the firmware upgraded and went ahead and changed the battery that allowed it to save settings when turned off. I panicked slightly on hearing this, afraid that all of my lovely settings had been lost. Fortunately, the good folks at Switched On know their stuff and everything was as it had been. According to the tech, I’d been very close to losing everything as the battery was on its last legs. This is what is often referred to as “foreshadowing.”

Last night, I was messing around with it and for some reason, I decided I should check to make sure the upgrade completed. This is exactly the sort of thing that got Orpheus in trouble. I didn’t fare quite that badly, but it was close.

This being an old piece of gear, the way you check the version is by turning it on while holding two particular buttons on the front panel.  I held down the 5 and the 8, turn it on, and….no version number popped up. I tried it a couple more times and got the same result. Then I pressed one of the keys and….silence. 

Uh oh.

It turns out that, had I looked it up again to make sure I remembered it properly, I would have found that the keys to hold down to get the firmware version were the 1 and the 2. 5 and 8, on the other hand, erase everything. All 88 patches gone. That dark, warbling organ sound that was so close to the one The The use on “Love Is Stronger Than Death?” Gone.

The silver lining is that I’ve had to learn some stuff. The DW is from back in the days of yore when synths were just learning to talk to computers. It’s actually designed to backup and restore its data using a cassette tape. I do not have a cassette tape. Fortunately a laptop makes a pretty good cassette tape substitute was I was able to track down a site that had the stock sounds saved as a .wav file. Just run a line from the laptop’s headphone jack to the “tape in” port on the keyboard, play the .wav file, and, holy cats! It worked.

Of course, they’re not my sounds, but at least there are sounds. So that’s a start. I should be able to use a MIDI interface to load other people’s sounds (and by “should,” I mean, “absolutely can if I can get it figured out”). I may not want those sounds, but I want to know how to do it so I can then back mine up.  It’s not that hard; I’m just not familiar with the tools of the trade and, remember, we’re talking about a synthesizer that celebrated its 30th birthday several years ago. 

So, yeah. Fred’s reminder about backing things up applies to everything. If it’s important to you, back it up. Automate it so you can’t not back stuff up. That’s the lesson. Silver linings are great, but cloudless skies are even better. 

 

You may have noticed that I haven’t updated my reading list lately. I haven’t given up; I’m just finding the current book, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, extremely slow going. One reviewer on Goodreads described it as “easy to put down,” an assessment with which I can’t argue. It’s a slog, but it’s also chock full o’ useful insights about what does and doesn’t work with regards to city planning. I’ll give it a full write-up when I’m done, but it’s taking me almost as long to read as Pynchon, so be patient.

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I’m in the technology business, and when it comes to support, there’s a certain scenario that happens so often it’s not even a joke anymore. One of our users will put in an urgent request for help, I’ll wander over to their desk, ask them to show me what’s wrong, and whatever problem they were having will disappear simply due to my looking over their shoulder. They say they’re doing the exact same thing (and I believe them), but everything will work swimmingly.

It happened to me yesterday.

I took one of my keyboards into the shop (the lovely folks at Switched On, thanks for asking) because my Radio Shack synth was acting wonky.  They plugged it in, tried it out, and absolutely everything I was having trouble with worked fine. Honestly, it worked better than fine because they’re all way better than me at playing it. Hrmph. Anyway, there was no charge, which was cool. I took it home, plugged it back in, and damned if everything didn’t work exactly as it was supposed to. So, if you were wondering whether “it” ever happened to IT folks? You betcha!

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So, it’s gong to happen. We’re going to go see what I think is the potentially the greatest sport on Earth in April: BATTLEBOTS. Two, 250-pound robots battling to the, if not death, then at least something very much like it. It’s incredibly violent, but nobody gets hurt, being smart counts for more than being strong, and there’s a fine balance between the engineering skill to build ’em and the skill to drive ’em. Oh, never mind. Just watch this and you’ll understand:

We’re going to see the final, which I imagine will be the long-awaited showdown between Minotaur and Tombstone. I am so lucky to be married to a woman who wouldn’t just tolerate this sort of silliness, but would actually be more into it than I am (and I can assure you, I am into it). Actually, I’m pretty lucky to be with her, full stop.

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I’m not sure why, but it only just hit me the other night how weird it is that my cat, all twelve pounds of him, feels perfectly comfortable sleeping between the two of us. I’m something approaching twenty times his size, so it wouldn’t take much rolling over to make his life difficult, but he just trusts us and lies down directly between the two of us. Can you imagine that if the roles were reversed? I wonder what goes through his little head. It just seems really unlikely and kind of mind-blowing that a creature that can’t even meaningfully communicate with us could develop that kind of trust outside of his species.

And so to bed, where I know I’ll find a little grey cat patiently waiting for me to settle in next to him.

-RK

Last time I wrote here, I’d not quite completed my 52nd transit around the sun. That’s no longer the case. I can’t think of anything particularly special about a 52nd birthday; it’s not divisible by five, there are no changes in legal status or demographic groups, but that’s fine. I’m still enjoying birthdays, quite a bit more than I used to in fact, so the 52nd one was definitely one of the good ones.

It helps that Nicole took it upon herself to spoil me enormously. We drove down to New Orleans and, rather than use the time to go drink and party and get crazy (as is my wont), we holed up in a beautiful hotel with the best bathtub I’ve ever experienced, drank wine, listened to records, and I even wrote a story about snails.

It was all pretty great.

New Orleans has something that every city worth the name ought to have; a downtown grocery store that’s open late. The Rouse’s (sp.?) was like a mini-Whole Foods with booze that was open until midnight and a block from the hotel. It is exactly what Austin needs if Austin is serious about people living downtown. 11 PM and needing a decent blush, some Spanish ham, and a plate full of cheese? No problem! 

The room was a corner one, overlooking the front door of the hotel. I think the bar at the hotel was a singles bar, in that everyone who went in came out of it single. Couples fighting make for marvelous entertainment, especially when one is soaking in a giant tub next to the window and has a glass of wine in one’s hand. It would have been even more poignant had the jazz album we selected not been a mis-filed Emerson, Lake, and Palmer record, but all in all, it was lovely.

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I currently have too many hobbies for a lazy SOB like me. Job #2 is kind of on the back burner while I’ve been playing with the music toys. It’s taken months, but I finally got one “song” down that I’m happy with. One. Then again, I guess this stuff is hard for musicians, so for people like me, it’s a miracle. I should probably learn more about using the sequencers at my disposal. I’m playing everything but the drum machine live and my sense of rhythm is legendarily poor. 

It’s fun, though. Just noodling around and occasionally coming up with something nice is very, very rewarding. Unfortunately, one of my co-workers just sent me this: The NSynth Super open source sound-making-thingie-that-is-definitely-not-a-Kaoscillator. Looks like I’m going to have to learn to solder.

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I just re-read The Sandman collection: Brief Lives. This was my entry point into Neil Gaiman and The Sandman. The comic book store next to the Bennigan’s where I worked had a big “new storyline” card on the first issue, so it seemed like a good place to jump in. At the time, I had no idea who close to the end it was; the end of the middle section I suppose. 

It’s The Sandman at his most emo, a pose that spoke to me at that time. It was all very strange to me as a 20-something, reading a comic book that was very much about the story being told. “Literary” is probably the right word. It didn’t follow any of the comic book conventions I recognized, but instead remained true to its own internal logic no matter how surreal (Delirum plays a bigger role in this story than any other). 

It’s a very different experience reading it today, knowing all that went on before and happened afterwards. Many of the story beats that seemed out of left field were established as far back as the first issue and some bits didn’t pay off until the very end. Mr. Gaiman is, as it turns out, quite good at his job. There are some bits that come off a little too emo or a bit twee, but it’s a great standalone story and felt that inevitable Sandman melancholy when I got to the end.

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Speaking of revisiting the past, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on YouTube last night. Watching Cyndi Lauper play the dulcimer is well worth anyone’s time.

After that I caught up on the biggest band from my freshman year in college. It was early 1985 and there was only one undisputed champion on KCOU in Columbia, Missouri: The dB’s! Oh sure, they played the Smiths and REM and other college bands, but there were no fewer than five songs from the dB’s new album “Like This” in heavy rotation. 

Like everyone else at Mizzou, I had a copy of the LP. I had no idea how lucky I was to find it. Here the singer and guitarist, Peter Holsapple, describing the album and the joys of working within the major label distribution system in the New York Times:

“About six weeks before “Like This” was to hit the streets, our big American debut album faced a new and horrendous snag: Bearsville’s distribution by Warner Bros. had come to an end…

So, as the music business punch line goes, “Like This” wasn’t released, it escaped. And then it disappeared. Without the muscle of Warner behind us, the band would find itself doing hastily arranged signings where there were no copies of the record. Promo copies went out to journalists across the country who discovered the new Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes album inside, due to a screw-up at the pressing plant…

There was a single of “Love is for Lovers,” but you couldn’t get it without special ordering. Then you couldn’t get it at all. It made no impact on radio, and the song did not receive a video treatment for the fledgling MTV.”

Ugh. One of the most important of records…scratch that, THE most important record of my college years wasn’t heard by pretty much anyone outside of Columbia, or so it seemed. I worked at record stores when I got home from college and there was no way to get hold of the album. It was two decades before I was able to get hold of it on CD. 

Give it a listen if you’re of a mind. It’s one of the finest artifacts of indie college radio from the mid-80s and thanks to almost literally everything going wrong at the time of the release, it remains an underrated gem. 
 

That’s enough and more than for now. Take care,

-RK

 

Loss is terrible. Whoever decided that this world needed loss in it is a lousy architect, and as for the philosophers who rationalize loss? “Our loss, our grief, is what makes us human!” Screw the lot of ’em. I’ll buy that it’s a biological inevitability, but you don’t have to glorify the damned thing. 

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I was up until three last weekend recording a drone-ish cover of an obscure Genesis song because that’s the sort of thing I do when I’m trying to deal with something that, ultimately cannot be dealt with. That’s fine. I needed to do it and I wasn’t going to sleep until it was (sort of) complete. Doing more of that would just feel like wallowing. I think I’d like to make some happier sounds now. I have a project, a non-musical one, that I’m going to get started next week that I’m excited about. 

We’re travelling next week, going to stay in a fancy hotel with a giant bathtub and we might even leave the hotel at some point. Might. I’ve grown to really enjoy travel, which sounds weird because everybody enjoys travel, but I was pretty ambivalent about it until recently. I think mostly it has to do with taking a long time to figure out how I like to travel. It turns out I have expensive tastes with regards to accommodations. I like a nice view, a big desk, and…postcards. I love to send postcards from hotels. Is that odd? I feel like that’s the century-ago equivalent of calling someone from an airplane and blurting out “Guess where I am!”

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After a week or so of heavy use, I can say without qualification that the Pixel 2 is the best phone I’ve used. I mean, It had better be, since it’s the newest, but what I’m most happy with is that it takes some remarkably good photos at close range without having to add external optics.  Here’s an example:

This is a zoomed image of a couple of snails in our garden crawling on a water bulb, without any filters or editing.  I’d say this one came out pretty well.

As far as Project Fi goes, I haven’t noticed an enormous difference in the quality of the service. This is in large part due to the fact that I seldom use my phone as a phone anymore. I am, however, more aware of data usage and make an effort to connect to legitimate WiFi wherever available. This is a side effect of the pricing, which is $10 a gigabyte per month, with a maximum of $60. If I just used the phone like I did with my old plan, I’d come out about even, but since this is more like a pay as you go deal, I think about it more.

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This is probably my favorite single strip from my favorite comic of all time:

I feel as though, if I could fully embrace this one strip, I’d be better off. 

That’s it for today. Take care.

-RK

About a year ago, we started keeping snails as pets. Nicole found an incredibly beautiful snail named Dazzle, and we brought in a friend to keep her company. Her companion was named McKenzie. We’d never kept snails before, so it was a learning process for us. One thing we learned was that snails are a good deal more resilient than we’d thought.

Last summer, there was an accident that resulted in McKenzie losing a good portion of her snail. Several times, we though we’d lost her entirely. We looked up how to patch a snail’s shell (the answer is: very carefully), but the predominant advice was to let the snail try to heal itself. McKenzie didn’t do much over the next month, but she rebuilt her shell stronger than before (we feed them a lot of calcium, which helps).

She and Dazzle were as close as we’d hope they’d be. In fact, they were even closer as produced several clutches of eggs. There’s nothing quite like waking up in the morning and finding dozens of tiny, almost completely transparent snails climbing the side of your aquarium. We wound up keeping one of the babies, Blink, and there then another who will have their own story one of these days (Lucky). 

Bringing in snails from outside, it’s hard to know just how old they are. They can live for several years, but you there’s no good way to tell the age of a snail, so we don’t know how old McKenzie was. What we do know was that, over the last month or so, she hadn’t been as active as she normally was. Sometimes that means there’s another batch of eggs coming, but it was worrying. 

This morning, our little McKenzie wasn’t with us anymore. Nicole told me when I was at work and I did everything I could to distract myself until I could get home. When I got home, I tried to wake her up and wound up just sobbing my eyes out. I’m still tearing up a little writing this.  Nicole, of course, had done everything I tried, but our friend was gone.

That may seem strange, to be that attached to animal that might not even perceive our presence and certainly can’t express any obvious affection. But, we brought them inside and we are completely responsible for giving them as good a life as we can and we do our best because they are truly marvelous creatures. McKenzie was a good little snail whose company we enjoyed greatly. I know snails are considered “pests” but please try to consider how gentle and beautiful they are the next time you see one. 

-RK