Category: Journal

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. Pretty Hate Machine was always going to be on here, wasn’t it? There was a pretty long period of time where it was almost the only thing I would listen to. It was the first album I was aware of that successfully merged industrial with dance with rock with the kind of “feeling sorry for yourself” that would have made Morrissey blush. I first heard “Down In It” at the Dallas dance clubs in the summer of 1989, but the album didn’t come out until November. The intervening months gave me plenty of opportunity to blow my expectations sky high and, somehow, Pretty Hate Machine exceeded them. There wasn’t a song on the album I didn’t love, a feat that wouldn’t be matched until….sometime later in this list. NIN never made another album anything like this one. Adrian Sherwood, Keith LeBlanc, Al Jourgensen, John Fryer, and Flood all worked on the production, which sounds like it could be a mess, but it all came together in a seamless whole with slinky dance groove underpinnings. Subsequent albums tended to be more aggressive and/or abstract, which is great, but wildly different in texture to the debut. Did it make an impact? Lordy, yes. Pretty Hate Machine was a lifestyle for me; it was an identity I didn’t know I was looking for. I wouldn’t stop talking about the damned thing. I went through more Rit black dye during this era than the rest of my life combined. It was an absolutely glorious time.

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. This is the album that Sigue Sigue Sputnik wish they’d made. It still sounds like an artifact from the future. Imagine the impact in 1989, 6 months before Pretty Hate Machine hit the shelves. I don’t know that any album ever took the cut-and-paste approach to making music to this extent.  It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Melding rapping to samples of metal guitar riffs and industrial beats, chock full o’ pop culture references both in the lyrics and the samples, it careens out of of control like a car that’s lost its brakes and is always this close to crashing.  Sadly, I never got to see PWEI. They were set to open for NIN but left the tour two weeks before the show in Dallas. In a sense, that might be for the best. Day/Hour/This was a revolutionary album, but the collage approach may not have worked as well in a live setting.  Was it influential? Enormously so. This was the album that brought hard rock into industrial for me, and hey, can walk talk for a moment about the aesthetic of the band? Look at that album cover. All of their merch was just as immaculately put together. *sigh* At least the singer is doing pretty well with his PWEI career.

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. A co-worker at the music store recommended this album to me…well, ok, that’s not strictly true. He recommended an album by Christian Death and I mis-remembered what he’d said and picked up Bad Religion instead. I’m glad I did, too. I’d never really taken punk seriously prior to hearing Suffer. I liked punk music, but I wasn’t cool enough to really “get” it.  This, though, I was something I could dig my teeth into. I’ll freely admit to having to whip out a dictionary, but c’mon, who uses “obsequious” in a song? BR get a lot of criticism for having clear vocals and tight harmonies (“that ain’t punk!”), but those were the things that appealed to me.  Did this album influence me? You could say that. It turned me into a shameless fanboy. I’ve seen Bad Religion over a dozen times now, and I own (and have read) all of Greg Graffin’s books and solo albums. Suffer opened the door to a bunch of other bands I now love (NOFX, Dance Hall Crashers, et. al.). It’s lean, it’s mean, and it’s nerdy-smart and it’s still my favorite punk album (although Punk In Drublic) comes close.

10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. I was raised on 60s musicals and 70s country and western music, which is to say, I wasn’t really that into music until I heard this album. 1970s Nashville-sound country was suffused with big string arrangements, maudlin lyrics, ultra-slick production and maybe a steel guitar or a slight twang that would identify it as “country.”  So, when my dad brought home this album, it was a bit of a shock. It was recorded live, with fiddles instead of strings and production so rough that you could use it as a chainsaw. I’d never heard “country” music with this kind of energy and musicianship. Hell, I’ve never heard it since.  In terms of “made an impact”, this one completely changed my understanding of what music was. This album was (and is) as rebellious as anything this side of Public Enemy (I mean, that’s a high bar). It was the antithesis of what the Nashville establishment wanted country to be and it’s all the better for it.  

Last night I came home to a wunnerful surprise. We were going on a pic-a-nick. Nicole had already packed up all the grilling supplies, so we were ready to head off to the park as soon as I got off the train. We picked Northwest Park here in Austin because it’s a little more forest-y than the other parks with grills and the sunsets are prettier, too.  One of the things I love about Austin as opposed to, say, Dallas, is that the parks get a lot of use. While we were making the fire and prepping the veggies, there were four competing sounds vying for our attention. The PA announcer at the baseball field next to us, the “country and 80s mix” the crossfit instructor was using for a class on a nearby hill, the clacking of the fake swords of honest-to-god LARPers by the tennis courts, and the children laughing on the playground. It was a pretty good mix that sounded more “alive” than “dischordant.”  We (I) may have gone a little overboard on the coals, but we were cooking ears of corn, baked beans, a poblano, bacon, and burgers on a small park grill, so we needed a little more width to our heat than normal. This also resulted in a lot more heat than I usually get, so everything cooked relatively quickly and we were eating before sunset. The other activities died down a little so we dined to the sounds of some French cafe jazz on the iPad. Accordions, acoustic guitars with nylon strings, you know the sound, right? Everything came out well and, after packing up, we decided we weren’t quite ready to leave yet. So, we wandered over and caught the last inning of the baseball game, a playoff between the underclassmen at two local high schools.  The game ended and half the people were super excited and the other half weren’t and we decided that was enough for the night and headed back to the car and then home. No photos since we were focusing more on enjoying the night than documenting it. Damned if I know what I’ve done to deserve such a lovely Tuesday evening but all I know is I want to keep doing whatever it is because this is way better than the life I thought I’d be living.  -RK

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. The LED even (sorta) spells out “tape” when you enable the load function, which is adorable. 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.