In a previous post, I discussed using FastScripts in combination with a simple AppleScript to assign a hot-key to accomplish annoying tasks.
I frequently change my sound output to the TV I have in my other room, and back again to my main office. It gets annoying to have to use the mouse, so using FastScripts and a modified AppleScript I found online, I toggle between audio sources.
This script currently only works with toggling between two outputs: "Line Out" and "Digital Out", but is easily made to toggle between any number of outputs. To add more/different outputs to switch between, simply add to the "theOutputs" list at the top by putting the name of the output in quotes, and separated by a comma. Please note that the outputs you wish to toggle between must be written EXACTLY as they are in your Sound Preference Pane (read: Case Sensitive!), but can be in any order you choose:
Code:
set theOutputs to {"Digital Out", "Line Out"}
tell application "System Events" set frontmostapp to item 1 of (get name of processes whose frontmost is true) end tell tell application "System Preferences" to activate tell application "System Events" get properties tell process "System Preferences" if (menu item "Sound" of menu "Window" of menu bar 1) exists then else click menu item "Sound" of menu "View" of menu bar 1 delay 1 end if set theRows to every row of table 1 of scroll area 1 of ¬ tab group 1 of window "sound"
set nextOutput to "" set nextIndex to 0 (* Obtain Selected Output / Choose Next Output based on Selected*) repeat with aRow in theRows if selected of aRow is true then set currentlySelectedOutput to (value of text field 1 of aRow as text) if currentlySelectedOutput is in theOutputs then set selectedIndex to my getitemindex(theOutputs, currentlySelectedOutput) if (count of theOutputs) is equal to selectedIndex then set nextIndex to 1 else set nextIndex to (selectedIndex + 1) end if else set nextIndex to 1 end if set nextOutput to (get item nextIndex of theOutputs) exit repeat end if end repeat (* Select the chosen Output *) repeat with aRow in theRows if (value of text field 1 of aRow as text) ¬ is equal to nextOutput then set selected of aRow to true exit repeat end if end repeat
end tell end tell # tell application "System Preferences" to quit tell application frontmostapp to activate
on getitemindex(this_list, this_item) repeat with i from 1 to the count of this_list if item i of this_list is this_item then return i end repeat return 0 end getitemindex
If you're like me and have a monitor/TV hooked up that's either powered off or in the other room or hidden in the torture chamber in the wine cellar, you have a problem with stray windows getting stuck on other monitors.
I found a script on another website which works pretty well but throws an error every time that was annoying me. Not only that, but it's not application-specific.
I prefer to use a free application like Fast Scripts in conjunction with my modified version of the script. This allows me to just get the windows I want from the frontmost app with a hotkey which I defined myself (I chose CTRL+M). The "newpos" variable might need to be modified if you have a tiny screen resolution and like 40 windows, but other than that, everything seems to work well.
Here's the modified script:
Code:
tell application "Finder" set _b to bounds of window of desktop set screen_width to item 3 of _b set screen_height to item 4 of _b end tell
tell application "System Events" set frontmostapp to item 1 of (get name of processes whose frontmost is true) tell process frontmostapp repeat with x from 1 to (count windows) set winPos to position of window x set _x to item 1 of winPos set _y to item 2 of winPos set newpos to (x - 1) * 32 if (_x < 0 or _y < 0 or _x > screen_width or _y > screen_height) then set position of window x to {newpos, (newpos + 22)} end if end repeat end tell end tell
The show's venue was changed at the last minute from the Clubhouse, which is a crummy club with a bad sound system (honored by GZA as "the worst system he ever rocked on") within walking distance of ASU, to Club 910 Live, which is a much better joint formerly called Boston's that's about 4 miles from campus. I think that this abrupt change hurt attendance somewhat, but the sound system at 910 is great, and the outdoor stage on the chilly night contributed a lot of frostbitten ambience.
This was an incredible value for a show -- 6 bands including black metal's defining act for $22 (or $18 if you got your ticket direct from a band). Over four hours of pummeling live metal for the price of a case of beer? Yeah, I'll take that. I was amazed at the low turnout -- I estimate 200 or fewer people were there in total, maybe as low as 125. How could the most sensational band in black metal draw such a small crowd? Gotta be some bad combination of poor publicity and venue change, because I know that there are literally dozens of extreme metal fans in Phoenix. One thing I noticed is that most of the crowd looked like 'traditional' heavy metallers -- you know, long hair, baggy clothes, spikes, makeup -- rather than the hipster, quasi-ironic emo-metallers (shorter hair, hats, colors other than black, fashionably tight trousers) that tend to dominate a lot of American black metal shows.
The opening act was locals Phoenix & Dragon, who shreiked through a half-hour set of Iron Maiden-derived power metal. The singer was top-notch, hitting those freaky operatic notes. The guitar players appeared to be very good players, based upon the speed with which their fingers flew across the fretboards during the many harmonized lead passages, but their tones were so saturated with distortion and compression that they were virtually inaudible -- it just sounded like a bunch of buzzing, wheezing wide-band static behind the drum noise. They were using Line 6 amps, and they probably had them set to "sounds great when I'm practicing but I didn't bother to check how it sounds in a band mix." This band wasn't a great genre match for the rest of the acts, being very far from black metal, and I think the crowd didn't give them enough props because of that. I enjoyed their set quite a bit though -- and they get extra points for their blue-jeans-and-white-sneakers 80s garage band attire.
Next up were Tuscon black metallers Chaos Ascending, who paint themselves like Gorgoroth while sounding and acting exactly like Watain. Which suits me fine, I @#$%ing love Watain! They played a set of very engaging Satanic black metal with a healthy dollop of thrash and anthemic rock thrown in. Excellent showmanship and playing from the whole crew, and the singer really made an effort to get the crowd involved with chants of "Hail Chaos! Hail Satan!" BC Rich guitars and Madison heads were the guitar gear of choice, and the bassist played a Steinberger Spirit 5-string. This band gets a big thumbs-up from me.
The LA band Abigail Williams followed with a very enjoyable set of Agalloch-style American blackish nature-metal. When I saw three guitarists and a bass player walk onstage, I was like "oh golly, this looks dire," but in fact, they played and sounded great. They played three epic, shifting songs with plenty of contour and dynamics, and an ambient backing track featured significantly. The lead guy, by the name of Sorceron, got splendid tones from a laser blue RG550 through a Dual Rectifier; the other two guitfiddlers used a white Gibson Flying V through a new white EVH 5150 III and a '90s Japanese Jackson Dinky (stripped to bridge-pickup-only) through another Dual Rec. These were the best guitar sounds of the night, and the whole set was a real treat for me.
Polish blackened thrashy band Hate took the stage next, corpsepainted and mostly shirtless, for an energetic set that got the crowd jumping like it was a Cypress Hill show. These guys had a distinct Children of Bodom flavor with a little Behemoth thrown in for good measure. Some of their songs were pretty much straight-up hardcore thrash metal with shreiked vocals, and the kids ate it up. Musicianship was very good; the guitarists played a Fernandes Rhoads-style axe and a black King V of indeterminate manufacture, through the same amps used in the previous set. A lot of the guitar solos had an actual "rock 'n' roll" blues-based feel, which was in strong contrast to the diatonic shred styles that dominated the rest of the night. The only thing that struck me as less-than-optimal about this band was the drummer, whose time was not all that great and whose occasional one-hit-too-many bass drum rolls were pretty distracting. Funny, because usually, the best musician in any given extreme metal band is the drummer due to the demands of precision placed upon them. That aside though, Hate turned in a good show.
Norse veterans Keep of Kalessin appeared next to deliver a rabble-rousing set of black fantasy metal. There were several diehard Kalessin fans in the audience who enthusiastically growled along with the singer as he relayed tales of dragons and stuff. This cat has some pipes and the melodic vocal parts were done in a very unique half-grunt, half-croon that was real effective. The shaveling drummer was like a machine gun, brilliant with stop-on-a-dime blast beats, bass rolls, and well-placed tom assaults that kept the heads bobbing. The guitarist was playing a fancily-appointed LTD Horizon through one of the Dual Rectifiers and getting a pretty good sound while playing like he was being chased by two malevolent mages or something -- superb musicianship all around in this band, and very good crowd interaction. When they played their last song, a cut from their recent record "Kolossus," the audience went apey.
After the next equipment breakdown / setup, there was a wait of at least a half-hour before Mayhem appeared. The crowd was getting antsy and chanted repeatedly for the band, but no dice. Mayhem's guitar techs fiddled with the guitars and amps a bit, and I checked out what gear was in use. Both guitar amps were Blackstar half-stacks. One guitar was a black-and-red Jackson Rhoads (I believe one of the Japanese models), and the other was a black LTD EC-1000. Hellhammer's bass was an old black Gibson Les Paul Special bass through what looked like an Ampeg 8x10 cabinet. There were a few Boss pedals around, sitting on top of one of the amps, but I couldn't tell what they were from where I stood at the edge of the stage.
Finally, the fog machine started spewing, and the main attraction got underway. Hellhammer strode onstage and sat down at his drum kit to much applause, and then the two guitarists, stand-ins for the murdered Euronymous whose names I don't know, walked on with bassist Necrobutcher, who sported a Mayhem t-shirt to remind everyone of what band they were watching. The crowd was going nuts as the opening riffs of "Deathcrush" sliced through the fog. Soon singer Attilla was visible through the haze. He was, as I'd expected from reading online reviews of their recent shows, most unusually attired. The singer, who'd appeared on the iconic record "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas," wore a red-lined taffetta Dracula cape over a Bathory t-shirt with a creative part-shorn, part-long hairstyle. He'd painted his face white with black curlicues. His microphone was taped to an inverted crucifix, and around his neck was draped a short noose of heavy rope. In his left hand he clutched a sans-mandible human skull, which he held with what appeared to be a cocktail napkin until he later revealed it to be a sash of some kind. Throughout the set, Atilla waved this skull in a spirited manner and used it as a puppet to 'sing' into the microphone.
I had expected that the band would turn in a performance that was at least partially 'phoned in,' due to the fact that they're pretty old and the crowd was so small, plus the venue change hassles. Not so! Mayhem launched into a show that was, in a word, phenomenal. The three originalish members looked pretty good for their ages, and Necrobutcher's showmanship exemplified what I like to see from a rock 'n' roll performance : lots of audience eye contact, moving around to make sure everybody gets to see him, cool rock poses and grimacing. He and Attilla posed together for phone cameras while performing several times, and everybody in the front row stage left -- me included -- got either a high-five or a handshake from Necrobutcher, whose facial experssion clearly communicated the fact that he was pretty darn thrilled with the show, for whatever reason.
To see such a storied, classic band in these close quarters was positively awesome and inspiring. They played plenty of hoary chestnuts like "Funeral Fog," the aforementioned "Deathcrush," and the title cut from "De Mysteriis...," along with some stuff that I didn't recognize that I guess was from their latter-day LP "Ordo et Chao" [sic]. Attila rasped and croaked well through all these tunes, and Hellhammer's performance on the drums was overwhelmingly great. Bludgeoning, powerful, orhestral, and precise, this was one of the best metal drum performances I've ever heard. Too bad they had him stuck way in back so that he was more or less invisible when the fog machine was running. The guitarists performed well, but their tone was really splattery and fizzy, making for a pretty indistinct guitar presentation that also sadly ate into Necrobutcher's great-sounding fuzzed bass. If this is what Blackstar amps sound like, I'm staying the hell away from them. I mean, of course black metal guitars are supposed to sound $#!%ty, but it should be "good $#!%ty" like Euronymous' Les-Paul 'n' Marshall tone on the records, or at least like Darkthrone.
The crowd was immensely excited and galvanized by Mayhem's performance, surging and headbanging furiously, horns aloft, while huffing out the words to songs they knew. The visible glee on Necrobutcher's face made the people rock even harder, and by the time to set was over, both the band and audience had a glow that I could only describe as postcoital.
In sum : a wonderful performance from a worship-inspiring headliner, supported by a grip of excellent opening acts. Rad show. (6,855)
... whereupon I found myself once again bandied about Adrift the four winds of fate. I had sailed the usually mild coast off the Northern shores of the isle as many times in my dreaming states as I had within the confines of corporeal reality and felt well within my capacity as a worthy seaman on these familiar waters. Something about the noontime struck me as particular, however; and with the sudden and unexpected onslought of a vast malodorous miasma I hastily retired below deck for a brief siesta.
When I woke, I found to my abject and absolute horror that not only had the pernicious zephyr accumulated but that it now occluded the sun and only a glowing red orb- like the egg of some great Eastern Serpent sat low in the sky... the only remnants of that ever lustrous solar champion of planet earth. When day turns to night it is an un natural thing; young cower beneath the mammalian warmth of the security; the birds pause in their flights and are disoriented; pale things in creeping places rejoice in the momentary triumph of their patron, Mother Night. Such was the way with this, no birds where to be seen nor heard and all manner of marine activity had ceased though earlier I had been greatly amused by a doting pair of young seals feeding near a particularly choice and active reef. I was greatly dismayed and while realization of this dawned on me it also happened into my mind that getting home would now be rather quite impossible as the accursed wind which had brought with it the lingering abortive musk had now all entirely vanished. Blown out and exhausted, Æolus had since pissed off for a nap or a moments respite. Panic had begun to take its icey hold upon the strings of my heart.
The urge to retch had been nigh uncontrollable since my unfortunate wake. With the dismal assesment of my current surroundings there was now nothing holding me back from emptying the contents of my stomach all into the placid sepia waters below. Through tear choked eyes I saw the murky water and prayed for rain. In times of incredible need, desperate animals are known to make bargains with themselves in order to bolster their courage enough to simply go on. Frantically, i began to search for a paddle. (15,782)
A headline on BBC grabbed my attention yesterday. Ex-Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev commented that Russian Prime Minister (and once and future President) V. Putin was "literally castrating" Russia's democratic system. His glaringly incorrect use of the word "literally" aside, that's some provocative talk.
Everybody has known that Putin is a bloodthirsty KGB thug with autocratic ambitions since the get-go. No revelation there; in fact, the Russian people wanted somebody like that to wipe out those pesky folks up in Chechnya. But the statement was bold and impolitic, maybe dangerous, even for Gorbachev. Of course, the blotchy ex-President is aged 80 this year, and that's about 500 in vodka-swilling Russkie years, so he surely knows that he's not going to see the decade out anyhow -- he has little reason to fear a fate like Alex Litvinenko's or Anna Politkovskaya's.
Haven't heard much about those poor blighters lately, huh? I got to thinking about them. Politkovskaya incessantly railed against Putin's efforts to turn the Russian state into a crime-sodden Mafioso version of the old Soviet regime, and there wasn't a lot of surprise when she turned up murdered on Putin's birthday -- a present, it was said, to Putin from some simpering vicious cur named Kadyrov.
As for Litvinenko, he was prancing quite merrily in London until a smarmy stranger slipped Polonium-210 into his cup of Darjeeling. In a note in English supposedly drafted by his lawyer at his request shortly before his death a couple weeks later, he openly accused Putin of ordering the hit.
Litvenenko was a KGB / FSB fixer and part-time goon-for-hire until he jumped the shark and held a press conference accusing his superiors of ordering the murder of his other boss, the apelike oligarch Boris Berezovsky. After that, he was mostly a professional pot-stirrer, blackmailer, and font of conspiracy theory while temping for the English security agency MI6. The sensational accusations of Litvinenko aimed at his former spook pals seemed inexhaustible, and, like the delightfully fantastic accounts of ex-Soviet Spetsnaz soldier Victor Suvarov, completely impossible to either prove or disprove.
Most of them are merely interesting, accusing the Russian government of orchestrating terror attacks on its own people for political gain, among other things, but there's one in particular that suddenly rang a bell with me when I read it again, years after the original allegation was made. Back then, being of the opinion that the dissolution of the Soviet Union and our own dalliances in the Middle East had thrust us into a chaotic era of distributed, decentralized terrorism, I laughed at it. But today, with our economy being equivalent to a pile of garbage, our global political standing severely damaged, and our defense posture compromised laughably by involvement in -- count 'em -- three wars of choice, it suddenly crystallizes and rings true.
Litinvenko's trenchant words were that "the center of global terrorism is not in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or the Chechen Republic. The terrorism infection creeps away worldwide from the cabinets of the Lubyanka Square and the Kremlin."
The key is the Afghan war. All politics junkies thought that it was plum insane when Bush decided to invade Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Didn't that chuckling little blue-tie boozehound know that the Soviets, who do not back down very often, had just fled in defeated shame after a long war there? And didn't he recall that it was us who had trained and armed the fighters and planners that became the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? They were called "Mujahideen" back then, and we loved them to pieces for willingly fighting a proxy war against our Red enemies for us. Then, once the Soviets had high-tailed it out of there, we said "Okey doke, thanks for killing some Russkies -- see you crazy Arabs later!" and left the Afghans to deal with the war's aftermath all on their lonesome.
The ex-Mujahideen were left with a desolate, befouled country with a population that was desperate, ill-fed, disease-stricken, and uneducated. As always happens in these situations, radical nationalist pricks took the scene over and started behaving in really beastly ways. After winning a nasty civil war, these guys -- now smirkingly calling themselves Taliban, "the students" -- cooked up an especially brutish version of Islamic law that took the worst elements of Wahabism and turned them up to 11. Through threats, propaganda, buy-offs of local warlords, and dumb violence, these whip-crazy clowns lorded it over the people like monstrous school bullies. But as do their greasy Italian peers the Mafia, they provided some public services, so that communities begrudgingly relied on them. The Taliban and the people at large were pretty miffed at the Americans for using them to fight a war and then splitting without helping to put their country back in livable shape.
Here's what I think happened then : After the collapse of the Soviet government and subsequent fragmenting of its territory, the Russian power stucture still had an obvious strategic interest in combating American influence -- a greater interest, in fact, since in the absence of credible opposition, the USA would become a global heregmon. However, the Russians now lacked both the resources and the political will to continue with their long-standing strategy of sapping our abilities using conventional proxy wars initiated by openly Commie revolutionaries (e.g., Korea, Vietnam, all that crazy ish down in Central and South America, etc). Most of the guys who assumed power had history as Soviet apparatchiks, so all the old desires, grudges, and mindsets remained, frustrated, under a different and waaay less-cool banner.
So they called up their former enemies the Afghans and said "Hey guys, sorry about that whole invasion thing. It was all that crazy Brezhnev and weird Gorbachev, we fired them. So you're mad at the Americans, right? They really gave you guys a raw deal, skipping out like that. Now they've invaded your brethren in Iraq. Guess they really like to screw Muslims over." The sweaty, seething Afghans said "You're darn tootin' they gave us a raw deal. We'd sure like to give them a piece of our minds, but we can't even pay for enough bullets to shoot our own adulteresses, much less get back at the Yanks."
The sleek-headed Russians replied "How about this : we'll give you guys some dough, plenty of weapons, and lots of training in covert operations if you promise to use them to really give the Americans hell -- on their own turf."
"Well hot damn!" said the Afghans. "Don't have to ask us twice. Let's get crackin'!"
So it was that the Russians cleverly changed Al-Qaeda from a loosely-organized asymmetrical-warfare unit designed to combat Soviet conventional warfare to a tool using which they could wage a worldwide proxy war on American interests. And -- bonus! -- they could now strike in American territory without fear of triggering a global thermonuclear war.
And strike, they did. In 1993, just two years after the 'fall' of the Soviet Union, the first terrorist attack on American soil since the Second World War was executed -- the World Trade Center bombing. This was followed by the Oklahoma City bombing and attacks against US interests in Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Yemen, all leading up to the era-defining attacks that demolished the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon on 9/11, killing 3000 people.
The 9/11 attacks created a situation that the Soviets could only have dreamed of : the USA miring itself in two enormously expensive, destabilizing, and diplomatically disastrous wars while organically creating a nearly limitless supply of fearless new jihadists, all at very little cost to the Russians and with practically zero political traceability to the Kremlin.
We slogged hard and unprepared through the Afghan war, being confounded by warlords and picked off by desert snipers just as the Soviets had less than a generation earlier. We bombed the living daylights out of where we figured the terrorists to be. More terrorist attacks, attempted attacks, and new small wars occurred, as the US government passed laws that greatly increased state power over individuals and caused discontent and division on the home front. The harder we tried to fight back against our attackers, the more Muslim civilians we killed, and the more vengeful resentment was incubated in the global Muslim population.
Meanwhile, completely uncontrolled war spending combined with essentially unconcealed corporate dictation of government policy combined to put the USA in the worst economic and social condition it had been in since the Great Depression.
So in less than 20 years, Russia had gone from being completely incapable of bugging its old enemy to having a more or less unstoppable way to constantly harrass, demoralize, upset, and drain the US. And after a break-in period, it was self-sustaining, requiring practically no maintenance since we handled the whole "fueling people's desire to be undeterrable suicide terrorists" thing.
Unlike Russian troops or even your garden-variety nationalist insurgents, jihadis would actually rather die than not die, which makes it impossible to convince them to sit down and be quiet. They need practically no expensive equipment; they can make bombs out of just about anything. They target civilians with impunity and can cause hundreds of deaths with each of theirs. Meanwhile, our political apparatus is distracted and inattentive as the Russian leadership solidifies its plan to burst out of its flimsy republican cocoon and spread its wings as a cackling drunken butterfly of Mafia-infused statism, free of any ideology but a raw lust for power.
The only thing left for us to do is to keep an eye on Russia, even as their autonomous jihadi robots spread ever further to do their bloody work. China is already in the business of securing a strategic advantage against the US by economic and colonial means; Russia aims to bleed us until our resources and will are stretched so thin that we have none left to resist their reassumption of parity. Then they can partner with any of the other numerous governments we've pissed off lately to further erode our interests and capacity. Putin, in a Freudian slip, has accused the Russian Mafia of involvement with Al-Qaeda. The kicker, of course, is that the mafia is indistinguishable from the government.
Of course, it could be that Litvinenko is wrong and that Russia is trying to go on the straight and narrow while dealing with its homegrown terrorist problem. If there's one thing the past decade has taught us, though, it's that the worst outcome is the most likely, and the most shocking possibility is usually true. And when the hideous nesting doll of modern terrorism is finally disassembled, I think we'll see a tiny, grinning, fundamental Putin. (38,620)
So, it has come to my attention that the kids at large have been letting themselves be influenced by the pernicious ramblings of English sensationalist David Icke, that is, the guy who warns of a secret society of lizard-people he calls "reptilians" that control the world's institutions.
In addition to being a total joke, both factually and philosophically, and probably not even a person who believes his own utterly laughable speculative fiction, Icke is a conduit for racist, anti-Jewish ideas. This is what makes his influence more problematic than that of your garden-variety propagandist, rabble-rouser, or cult leader.
Below is my open letter to all who read or take seriously the output of David Icke. If you are among these folks, please read this letter in its entirety.
------
Listen. I'm not writing to argue with or attack you, I'm writing to give you a heads-up about something that concerns you. I know what it's like to be a person searching for answers to the way this often corrupt and assaultive world works. I get it. But the twisted racist venom of people like Icke is not the place from which to get your 'awareness.'
Before you start defaming yourself by parroting Icke's "truth," you must allow yourself to acknowledge that Icke, in his defining book "The Robots' Rebellion," repeatedly and explicitly references the book "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which is by far the most famous and influential piece of anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic propaganda from the 20th century.
It's also a fact that in much anti-Jewish propaganda of the early 20th century and earlier, Jews are portrayed as having lizard-like characteristics --- this to dehumanize them and make them easier to hate. It is not coincidence that Icke uses the same imagery.
Do you understand this? Any time you spout Icke's ideas, you are associating yourself with the worst genocide in the history of modern Europe, and the ongoing racism that attends it.
Do you claim to support peace, wisdom, humanity, or higher consciousness? If so, I don't suspect that the above is an image you want to cultivate for yourself. Nor the sort of thing you want infecting your internal worldview. I believe that you have a brain that works and you may have important contributions to make to the world. Once you get yourself labeled as an anti-Semite, no serious peace-loving person is going to give you the time of day. Sit back and think it though.
It's not a matter of "backing down" from your beliefs. Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." It's a matter of realizing that something's not right with the information you've been given and revising your opinions in light of that realization.
Now, if Icke, who is more or less the Rush Limbaugh of conspiracy salesmen, has snowed you to the extent that you can't even be bothered to reread "...Rebellion" to see whether what I'm saying is true, well, that's your business. But the reality is that you will realize, sooner or later, that his propaganda is senseless, crypto-racist, and a crass scheme to make money on fabricated controversy. My hope is that this letter will help that time come "sooner."
Icke and his cartoon sensationalism aside, here's a serious suggestion for you : stop wasting your time reading insubstantial hogwash, and instead start learning how to solve, or at least address, some real-world problems. If you want to expand your consciousness, try reading some Zen koans or Lao Tzu or Brian Greene or Roger Penrose. If you want to learn about *real,* not made-up, problems that face the world and affect millions, read Francis Lappe or "Twinkie, Deconstructed." And if you want to understand how the world works, learn some science. In fact, the scientific method is a good way to start learning how to parse the credible from the bullshit.
There are a billion people on this planet who don't get enough to eat, daily. Hundreds of children die *every day* from dysentery, cholera, and other epidemics. Day in and day out, people are harassed, abused, and murdered because of their religion or ethnicity. The oceans are poisoned and the world is running out of clean water. The bees are dying en mass and can't pollinate properly. Don't you think it'd be a better use of your mind and energy to start working on some of these problems rather than worrying about who is and who isn't a lizard?
As I said, you can take or leave what I'm presenting here. It's up to you. But, again, I implore you : sit back. And think it through. (21,055)
Let me first start out by saying that the last year of medical school is basically a bad joke nowadays. Historically, the 4th year was where medical students would continue the crazy feats of the 3rd year like toting the weight of the entire hospital on their shoulders while being loosely monitored by interns who were working so many hours they didn't even know there was a world outside the hospital after a while.
As any person who is entering the field will tell you, whenever the old doctors hear about our current duty restrictions, an over-rehearsed unending diatribe about how "back in my day .... 300 hours straight, while being raped by my attending, who was actually a walrus" will pour forth as if it were solicited. Yeah guy, we get it.
One such story was from an emergency medicine doc talking about his life as a medical student. He said that after a 30+ hours of admitting patients and running around the hospital like crazy, his attending physician told him to perform a lumbar puncture on a patient on the other side of the hospital. The young student jumped at the chance, flew through the labyrinth of corridors, triumphantly conscripted the assistance of a nurse, and began the procedure. Doing an LP is a simple but sometimes difficult procedure. You're basically inserting a needle into someone's lower back between the vertebrae next to the spinal cord and extracting some of the surrounding liquid (CSF) for analysis. What could go wrong? The young student performed the task masterfully. The needle went in, and the pus-saturated fluid started pouring out, really pouring out. Literally seconds after penetration of the needle, the patient seized and died. The patient had an infection in his CSF so bad that the pressure had increased dramatically. By providing an unmitigated outlet for that pressure, the differential forced the lower part of the cerebrum to cram through a tendenous opening within the skull, squishing that part of the brain, killing the patient almost instantly.
As if that weren't a terrible enough scenario for a young med student like me to hear, the EM doc followed it up with "Yeah, that was the first one I killed." The doc then looked around nervously, turned around, and went back to writing his note.
People hear these stories and immediately blame the medical student. The reality was, the Attending should have informed the student about the results of the patients head scan (which showed the pressure), but forgot. The modern-day medical student spends half of his/her time shadowing their doctor and being generally bored our of their skull. Having medical students doing procedures like lumbar punctures is a lot less commonplace.
But are we really better off? Sure, it can be dangerous to perform some procedures when improperly supervised, but how then do we produce more professionals that can perform those procedures? What caused this shift from learning as a student to learning as a late 20-something?
Medicare rules are what changed. Nowadays, medicare wont pay physicians who do delegate even menial responsibilities to medical students. Some physicians do anyway (lucky for me), but the fact that so many play by the rules means that our medical school graduates are fairly useless.
One of my old preceptors runs a clinic in rural Oklahoma. He was one of the best doctors I've ever known. He kept up on the science and could tell you the molecular biology and physiology of most of the things he was prescribing, and he never relied on this idiotic one-size-fits-all algorithm medicine that is taking over these days (if PATIENT has CHEST PAIN, get CARDIAC ENZYMES x 3, then STRESS TEST). He has been practicing for over 40 years and NEVER did an internship. He asked me if I was excited to start my intern year. I told him that I considered residency a formality, and that I was ready to be an intern a year ago. If the powers that be would have let me experience the training I needed, I would be ready to practice today. As it stands I feel like I had wasted a year or more of my life in pursuit of a piece of paper that essentially only qualifies me to be an intern and not practice medicine. He chuckled and said "Yep, kiss the last years of your twenties goodbye."
Instead of making mistakes as medical students, our sheltering due to the ridiculous Medicare system means that 1) now we MUST do a residency (not just an internship) and 2) we will be useless for the first few months of intern year.
So here I am, exactly 1 week into my intern year. I feel pretty good that I'm getting at least a meager pay check but I am having to play catch-up like crazy to fit into the shoes I was not allowed to fill over the past year. Even with the new duty-hour restrictions, it is very intense. I've worked 76 hours in the past 7 days if you believe my logs (which we have to fudge in order to get the work done and still stay within the rules), and it seems that with all the ridiculous amount things I've learned so far, I can conclude I've only scratched the surface.
It just seems like the entire doctor-production-line has been lengthening over time. It used to be you didn't have to do an internship. Then internships became necessary. Now internships aren't enough and you have to do an entire 3 year residency. I'm just wondering if the powers-that-be can do the math and see how many people they are discouraging from the profession.
Sure, a slave-like existence during medical school is tough, but let's look at the alternative:
18 year old high school graduate +4 years undergrad minimum +4 years medical school +3 years residency --------------------- 29 years old at the youngest
Add in 3 years of subspecialty training, and you're looking at a person who has been living on debt, parental assistance, and laughable paychecks until age 32. Surgeons have a 5 year residency plus sub-speciality training if they want it. Interventional Cardiologists (the guys who clean out your arteries when you have a heart attack) have to do 3 years of Internal Med residency, 3 years of Cardiology sub-speciality training, plus 2 years of practice with the cardiac catheters (8 years, if you're keeping track).
Yes, there are still morons like me who will throw away their 20's and a live a frugal life to catch up with their loans. However, you can see why people would much rather choose much easier career paths. If the trend of duty-restrictions continues, it's only logical that eventually nobody will want to go through the enormous trouble of becoming a doctor anymore.
The Two-Year Wonders
Meanwhile, more clever people are becoming Nurse Practitioners and Physicians Assistants. With only 2 years of graduate school and NO residency, they legally do most of the things a doctor can do except understand what the **** it is they're doing. The "Algorithm Medicine" mentioned before is designed to stuff all patients into a flow chart of care. Of course it works and solves most problems most of the time, but results in people being over-medicated, over-radiated, and ultimately over-encumbered by the cost.
Paradoxically, the push towards unskilled providers is driving costs through the roof.
Conclusion
Placing blame and attempting to change the direction of the unstoppable rolling-boulder of mediocrity wont fix a thing. Even if you think you know the solution to the problem, the implementation of your ideas will never get passed the metaphorical armies of bureaucrats who write rules that are enforced by literal armies of police and courts. Try and practice medicine without a government sanctioned license? Go to jail. Try and practice with a license without having attended residency? Do so without insurance and risk all that you've done with every human being you try and help.
I suppose I still hold on to hope that government and tort will halt their assault on American medicine, but realistically it's hard to be optimistic. I am just glad I got off easy, I got in before the barriers to becoming a doctor required an actual commitment to indentured servitude. (60,312)
So in case the policy decisions of raising income taxes for the upper brackets and printing money to give away to large corporations (especially banks) were too subtle for you to understand the point, Geithner spells it out in this congressional hearing.
He's basically acknowledging that a tax on people making over 250k is going to directly impact small businesses. He acknowledges small businesses create the majority of jobs but continues to assert that we need the money to "stimulate the economy." He is saying that if the government shrinks, the Keynesian perpetual motion machine will break down and all the worthless government employees we pay for will have to find new jobs.
I'm glad someone in the administration is willing to admit they hate small business in favor of huge government and big corporations. At the same time, it's highly depressing he can openly admit it like this with basic impunity. (37,758)
Or, maybe not so alien. Twenty-five years ago, our government was making deals with the Afghani Taliban and daydreaming about bombing Khadafi and his whole blood-sodden country back into the Stone Age, while disgraced TV preachers hid their stoatlike faces in shame. A decade ago, we were making deals with Khadafi while bombing the bejeezus out of the Afghans. Today, most people have figured out that making deals with us is a losing game, so we've just decided to bomb them all while this decade's disgraced preacher, the evil and destructive Harold Camping, gets his cosmic comeuppance, having been silenced by a stroke shortly after having conned many thousands out of their life savings to fund his ill-considered psuedobiblical doomsday campaign.
Meanwhile, the dope-sick shaggy hounds running the show at GOP headquarters are toasting the upcoming election, having learned over the past several years that the American public has a deep thirst for a certain species of bloodthirsty lobotomite, itself the result of a secret breeding program having been conducted deep within turncoat Dennis Miller's grotty basement over the past 15 years which culminated in the release and subsequent wild success of openly stupid, murder-crazed hateshell Sarah Palin. She slyly assisted in the final killing of emasculated old fool John McCain and then built herself an immense cult of ignorance. Its members, who are legion, aren't shaken when she or her numerous imitators are exposed as dangerously incompetent and possibly in the end stages of neuron-destroying syphilis. They applaud and rally, energized by a leader whose function it is to mirror and validate their own ignorance. Palin even became the first mainstream national American politician since the Reconstruction to openly encourage use of the racial epithet "n***er," which is no small signifier.
Palin and all of her murderous minions were raised on the bread of Ronald Reagan, a man whose twisted vision was driven by dreams of Armageddon. They've taken his doomed, "Us vs. Them" approach to reality and inverted it so that instead of Commies, they're after "Liberals" and others who don't cleave to their deeply nihilistic worldview. And of course, the slavering-mad rabble that follows them is ready to do their command. Arizona Repesentative K. Giffords found out the hard way what it's like to tangle with the insane animals influenced by these Draculas.
Of course, at the other end of the room we have a big clump of cackling Satanic hyenas who managed to hoodwink a nation sick of George W Bush's warmongering, total disregard for human life, and habit of giving tax money away to private corporations, and immediately after being elected on their platform of "Change," proceeded to perpetrate all the same vile crimes as their predecessors, but worse. Most of the poor saps who'd supported the Democratic ticket in 2008 were starting to get wise to this, when the news started pouring in that the hyenas had managed to summarily execute the king bogeyman of the previous decade. Whether or not that actually happened is irrelevant. Either way, the news gave Obama, who seemed destined from the start to be a one-termer, a vague shot at winning re-election in 2012. The hyenas are pleased, and lap happily at pools of human blood that have collected in their corner. .
And amidst these atavistic spectacles are the blighters once known as 'citizens,' but now more commonly called by a name that better describes their function -- "consumers." They're so petrified at the idea of having to confront reality outside the poisoned cocoon of cheap products that they more or less just hold tight while being slowly exsanguinated, hoping that they'll be able to cling to the bizarre and terrible fantasy of comfort and security until they're gently plucked from the land of the living by a smiling G_d.
The bottom line is that we're living in a profoundly cruel replay of the very worst scenes from the 1980s. Only this time, after a busy 30 years of systematically ruining our resources and society, 'hope' isn't anything but a mean joke sometimes cracked at drunken and cynical cocktail hours.
At least this time around, we don't have to listen to Don Henley. (23,800)
Wispy chick vocalists. DJ culture. Vague 'swinging Sixties' Brit references. Drum-n-bass breaks. Lounge vibe with a dark edge. These are some of the cliches that we've come to associate with '90s music. Certain bands from that era -- usually, the bands that came later, say '95-'98 and were influenced by the early '90s acts -- tend to combine all these factors in such a way that they now appear cartoonish. Sneaker Pimps, Lamb, Morcheeba. And so are the authors of "Formica Blues," the English auteurs of the album at hand, "Formica Blues."
One of the big differences between Mono and your average "trip-hop" / downbeat band is that, while most downbeat is based on spare, atmospheric samples, Mono relies heavily on classical (or, at least, "? and the Mysterians"-derived) keyboard figures. Martin Virgo, the music-producing half of the duo, is apparently a session keyboardist who used to work with Wild Bunch legend Nellee Hooper, so it stands to reason. Siobhan de Mare, the singer, frosts the spooky instrumentals with her pleasant, and undeniably Nina Persson-influenced, pipes.
The opening cut, hit single "Life in Mono," combines a wistful Blondie-esque melody with a grating harpsichord motif and post-jungle drums. All the ingredients of the ideal 90s downbeat tune are here : tweezy synth filter sweeps, sloshy sampled hi-hats, floating female vocal, occasional frantic breakbeats, mencholy melody.
Following this is "Silicone," which signals the record's turn to standard Portishead-influenced downbeat. There is a lot of "P" in this band -- when it's not being overtaken by jungle breaks, spy-oriented cut "The Outsider" sounds like something off "Dummy." This isn't a bad thing -- Mono does it well, and the influence of the moody Bristolians is pretty tough to avoid in this genre.
The oddball song is "High Life," which is a major-key uptempo sixties thing that TOTALLY sounds like the Cardigans in every way.
One of the standout tracks here is the instrumental closer "Hello Cleveland," whose vague Polynesian percussion feel and melodica stabs make it sound like Combustible Edison let loose in a room full of samplers. Also nifty is "Slimcea Girl," with its big sampled gospel choir.
"Formica Blues" is a good record. It's a perfect 90s time capsule. And taken for what it is, it's very enjoyable indeed. One thing sticks in the back of my mind, though, making me uneasy : "Formica Blues" is the damn paterfamilias blueprint of every Starbucks-electronica that was burped forth by innumerable bands in its wake. Who's to blame?
Of course, that's not Mono's fault. After all, Muddy Waters could never have known that his music would spawn the noxious ham sounds of Claptron and his minions. It's best to just relax the mind and enjoy this LP without allowing yourself to be mentally transported to a place where coffee drinks are $5 and the evil stench of global corporate fauxreality permeates every cubic inch of air. (23,301)
Screaming Trees were part of the first crop of "grunge / alternative" acts that emerged in the early '90s. They never achieved the big-time success of their buddies Soundgarden or Smashing Pumpkins -- today, they're best remembered for their minor hit single from the "Singles" soundtrack, "I Nearly Lost You," and for having been the launching pad for the career of Mark Lanegan, one of the greatest rock singers ever to howl into a microphone.
Lanegan later went on to sing with Queens of the Stone Age and Martina Topley-Bird after releasing a bunch of brilliant solo records. But what about the music of Screaming Trees, who seem damned to spend eternity as a grimy footnote in pop history?
One thing's for sure : if you haven't listened to them since you were a whippersnapper, their debut LP "Sweet Oblivion" will transport you back to the era of goatees and ripped-up Levi's Silver Tabs with no delay. Unlike "Nevermind," which has a crispy shiny sheen left over from 80s production values, or "Badmotorfinger," which is basically a heavy metal album and sounds like it, "Sweet Oblivion" is 100% pure unadulterated 90s grunge rock. The rhythm guitars are ragged like an acne-ridden Neil Young, the lead guitars are ridiculously over-distorted, and the drums are filled with cymbal crashes and rolls. This record sounds like the Platonic ideal of a "garage band." .
The big difference between what I call proper grunge music (Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, Pearl Jam) and the numerous other bands that got lumped in with grunge (Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Tad) is that the former are fundamentally Beatles / Pink Floyd / REM influenced slop-rock bands with a 70s feel, whereas the latter are straight metal bands whose managers convinced to start doing photo shoots in flannel shirts. Grunge, being a singer-songwriter tradition, is usually based on chord changes, while metal is based on riffs.
There is no way that you'd mistake "Sweet Oblivion" for a metal record. This is song-oriented, strummy, moody capital-"R" Rock that has no interest in getting you to headbang or commit Satanic atrocities. One of the things that really strikes the listener about the sound is that its guitars are authentically sloppy. None of that Bob Rock / Butch Vig stuff that's been recorded on the 37th take and run through every piece of studio trickery available. These tracks are really played with raw tone and a "whatever" attention to precision. This means that "Sweet Oblivion" perfectly captures its era -- no trait defines the early 90s more than bored apathy.
Apart from the hit, which is by far the catchiest tune on this grimacing mopefest, the closer "Julie Paradise" is my favorite cut. Set to a hard-swinging drum gallop, this tune hits all the right buttons with its exuberant guitar squeals and Lanegan's saxophone-like voice gruffling out lines like "Something's going wrong in my mind!" No kidding, Mark!
Classic teen-angst anthem "Shadow of the Season" has a sinister cast, with Lanegan grasping for reasons not to off himself.
"Troubled Times" is pretty cool too, with a very typical 90s fatback beat and a melody line that is reminiscent of "I Nearly Lost You" and was also ripped off by second-wave grunge poseurs Seven Mary Three.
We even get the requisite introspective ballad in 6/8 time, "No One Knows."
Most of the tunes here lope along at a slowish tempo, so to more fully externalize the band's inner turmoil. The way I feel about this really illustrates how my tastes have changed in the 20 years since this record dropped. These days, I prefer my tunes to be either toe-tappingly fast, or phelgmatically slow. This whole mid-tempo trip really throws me for a loop (or a lack of one, am I right?). Of these tunes, only "More or Less" is taken at what I'd call a Sabbath tempo, "Butterfly" and "Julie Paradise" are the only fast songs, and most of the melodies are meandering in service to the lyrics. But I can still get in touch with my preteen self to know that this is the still ultimate soundtrack to an afternoon closed up in one's room, posters covering all walls, scratching out confused and angry words on the pages of a Mead composition book.
The bottom line on "Sweet Oblivion" is that it's fundamentally mood music for self-conscious, doubt-ridden teenagers and college kids. And it's pretty glorious. Even if you didn't grow up in the 90s, Lanegan's vocals, gold drowned in nicotine, are worth the price of admission. But don't put it on thinking that you're going to get a shred of irony or smirking. This music is sincere enough to bring the Great Pumpkin to the pumpkin patch. (23,434)
Dom Moio is, like me, an Italian kid from Portland, Maine. Unlike me, he's also a virtuoso musician and a local hero in the Phoenix jazz scene. His expert command of trap drums and Latin percussion instruments has people clamoring for his live performances, session work, and classes at industry clinics and ASU.
Moio has done countless sessions -- including playing all the drums on the Four Tops' box set-- but his self-released solo LPs deserve more recognition. One of my favorites is his Latin jazz disc "Cinco de Moio." Recorded in 2005 with Ionnis Goudelis on keyboards, Bob Lashier and Mike King on bass, Jerry Donato on tenor sax, Joe Garcia on percussion, and Dom's brother Bill Moio on guitar, this record isn't your average smooth-jazz faux-Latin pap. Moio is deeply schooled in traditional South American, Cuban, and Mexican rhythms, and that carries this whole disc into the category of "contemporary jazz I'd listen to by choice."
There's a lot of variety here. "Arroz con Pollo" has a hip Dolphy-sounding hook, while "El Tipo Blanco Tocando La Rumba" is pure hardcore African-influenced rhythm. The use of flute on a lot of these cuts, combined with Cuban-style piano and congas, gives the record a vintage '60s feel - but without caricature. The music here sounds fresh.
One of the highlights is the playing of guitbox furnace Bill Moio who, for my money, is one of the best jazz guitar players alive today. His lines are inventive, thoughtful, exciting, and free of the aping cliche that haunts so many who ply that craft.
The percussion work from Moio and Garcia is outstanding. They inject a big dose of vibe and edge into the set, which really keeps things interesting -- even on the mellow cuts like "Tres Palabras" or the opening "Tango for You."
Another great thing about this record is that the pointless high-speed bop-oriented modal noodling that infects a lot of modern jazz is pretty much absent here. Moio and his crew are more interested in creating memorable melodies and putting you in a good mood than they are proving how many notes they can play over two bars of a G#m7b5 chord. In fact, this might be the most hummable Latin jazz release of the last decade.
"Cinco de Moio" is a top choice if you're after a deft Latin jazz set that will put your party in a groovy zone AND make for good listening later on. Unless you live in Phoenix, it's probably not available at your local record store -- so nab it direct from Dom at http://DomMoio.com . (21,723)
The Ramones, who were barely able to make a living during their two-decade-plus existence, have been posthumously lionized to the extent that nearly anything one could say in their praise is an instant cliche.
One thing about their legacy is for sure, though : the actual SOUND of their classic first and second LPs leaves a lot to be desired. Recorded on practically no budget in tiny amounts of time, "Ramones" and "Rocket to Russia" actually sound kind of flat and tame. Which is a real drag, considering that they're brimful of some of the best, wittiest pop songs ever written. Wouldn't it be great if all those songs sounded raucous, manic, polished, and at the same time raw? Like Mother Nature intended?
Well, luckily for all of us, King Biscuit Flower Hour Records got a hold of a high-quality recording of a complete early 1978 Ramones set at the Palladium in New York City. They realeased all 27 songs on a single disc in 2003, and boy, is it a doozy!
The Ramones have, perhaps partially due to their glue-sniffing teen-slacker image and partially to their legendary musical simplicity, always had a reputation for being sloppy, chaotic, and unprofessional musicians who paid more attention to the energy of the songs than the actual quality of their performance. This live record proves that old assumption to be utterly wrong. Through the entire set and two encores, the Ramones are completely locked in, focused, and tighter than the lid on a Belvedere bottle when you wake up at 1pm on a Sunday and really, really need a Bloody.
The band's not only tight -- the recording really highlights just how good the "brothers" were as musicians. Joey in particular turns out to be a really splendid singer -- his pitch and tone are consistently outstanding. You can really tell that he's spent a lot of time singing early-60s pop songs in the shower, because his mastery of that gestalt is complete. He projects a lot louder and more forcefully than he does on the records, and it sounds great. Tommy is completely in-time and hits with power. Johnny's guitar is searing, powerful, and massive -- so very much better sounding than on the records. Dee Dee doesn't disappoint, either. It's totally invigorating to hear these songs with excellent sound and frantic passion in the performances.
There are 27 tracks on this record, and not a clunker among them. There are some particular standouts, though : "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" and "I Don't Care" are crushing, "Commando" sounds a million times better than on the record, "Cretin Hop" is infectious, "I Wanna Be Well" is soaked with pathos, and "We're a Happy Family" is chilling. Also, the version of "Surfin' Bird" on this record is maniacal.
I own a lot of records from the 'original' NYC punk era, including some live ones. This set, like no other, captures the zany, frantic, electrifying excitement that I imagine to have been present during that time. Not having been alive when the actual ish went down, it's a blessing to have a rockin' time-machine like this. Not to say that the Ramones sound dated or 'retro' here -- the no-frills music and crisp sound give the record a thoroughly modern feel.
"Live January 7 1978" is simply THE Ramones record to have. It's a treat for fans and will convert any lingering doubters. If you don't get it now, you might end up watching "Wheel of Fortune" reruns while wating for Rush Limbaugh's radio show to come on. Don't say I didn't warn you. (22,852)
So, I'm in this group called Hepnova. We do unique pop music (find proof at http://hepnova.bandcamp.com ); and today, someone asked about what gear we use in the studio. Being a terminal gear hound, I got real carried away and wrote waay too detailed of a primer, so I thought I'd share it with the Latewire so other curious musos can peep it.
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Re : the sounds on recent Hepnova tracks : The synths are played by my homeboy Lee-Sean Huang, who sings and writes many of those songs. The physical synths these days are a 25-year-old Yamaha DX-27 (like the runt brother of the DX-7) and a brilliant little box called a Sid Station. We also sometimes employ a huge old Alesis 88-key (I forget the model). Most of the really distinctive sounds (solos, etc) are the Sid unit. We use the native sounds on the DX-27 once in a while for organ or chimey bell sounds, but usually, most of the 'traditional' synth sounds and bass are coming from software modules in Logic Pro, using the Yamaha as a controller. Some of the stuff is quantized, but the majority is played on the keyboard in real-time. We used to have a Novation Bass Station, but stupidly sold it when Lee-Sean moved to NYC for grad school. Big regret.
My guitar setup on recordings varies with the song, but generally on "Transistor Troubadour," you're hearing my black SG Special, which is a @#$%ing ace guitar, through either my English-made AC15 mic'd with Oktava MK219 condensers, a Behringer V-Amp emulator, or software amps in Logic.
I used to hate hate hate using soft amps or emulators in the studio, but with the recording now happening in my home studio with a baby sleeping nearby, we didn't have much choice at night. It takes a lot of effort to get fake amps to sound decent, especially for clean tones, but I think we got pretty decent results.
On the new album, about 75% of the guitar is fake amps with the balance being AC15. Since 2010, I've mainly used the SG and my old Rickenbacker 360. For example, on "Total War," the percolating rhythm part is the SG going through the V-Amp, while the clangs and the gainy lead lines at the end are the SG through the AC15 cranked all the way. On "Petrosino Square," the heavy rhythm guitar is the SG through soft amps, while the chiming arpeggios in the chorus are my Rickenbacker 360 through the AC15. On "Ghost Adventures," the lead sounds are my red Jaguar strung with 13s in standard pitch through the AC15, while the roaring rhythm guitar is the SG into the emulator.
All the acoustic guitar sounds are either from my Takamine steel-string or one of two crummy old nylon-strings.
On the stuff from 2007 through 2009, I used a mix of Rickenbacker, Phat Cat equipped Epiphone Les Paul, Jaguar, Strat, and Epiphone Sheraton (Duncans), usually with the AC15 but once in a while through my JC120. I tell you, when I got that SG in early 2010, it was like "Wow, THIS is where it's at!" Now I also have a Gibson Tennessean, which will be the main axe on all our stuff in the foreseeable future. The guit just eats everything else I've ever played.
Everything from 1998 though 2006 is Rickenbacker through AC15.
I use Dunlop Stubby 1.0mm picks.
The recording interface is a Presonus Firepod, which feeds into a Macbook Pro running the latest version of Logic Studio. That software has been such a boon, especially when sampling. As you can probably tell, most of our samples are us playing live percussion, etc, in the studio, and Logic is easier even than Recycle for getting those hits cut up and mapped to keys.
All our stuff prior to the year 2000 was recorded with SM57s, but since then we've used condensers on everything, including amps and drums, and very often in stereo.
The percussion sounds we use are a defining characteristic of our music, and that stuff is 98% self-recorded samples from my big collection of Latin and other international percussion instruments and my drum kit. Some kicks drums are treated djembe or cajon hits, but most are 808 or 909 samples in Logic. (22,977)
Grindcore songs are usually short, warpspeed, unrelenting blasts of aggression. Songs less than one minute long are common. The guitar riffs, complex as they may be, usually just sound like a mass of thrashing noise. The drums are responsible for most of the sonic texture, with tight fills punctuating the "blast beat" style sixteenth-note onslaught. On-a-dime start / stop dynamics characterize the performances. Lyrical topics are often more focused on socioeconomic evils like oppression, fascism / sheepism, environmental collapse, alienation, and general depravity than the slasher-film-style gore that characterizes death metal (though militant vegetarian-grind exponents like Carcass and Cattle Decapitation use extreme gore as a way to illustrate the horrors of the meat industry). Vocals are most often done in the "cookie monster" grunt, though a rasping style is also heard. Grindcore is heavily influenced by hardcore punk in its short-sharp-unornamented aesthetic.
Death metal songs share grind's brutality, but are usually more riff-centric, with more complex (and distinguishable) guitar patterns, longer songs, and even guitar and drum solos (which you'll rarely hear in grindcore). Shifting, asymmetrical song structures are common. Vocals are "cookie monster" or delivered in a throaty roar (sometimes, black-metal style rasps are heard). Lyrics tend to focus on blow-by-blow, near-medical accounts of gory violence, Satanism / anti-Christian / demonic stuff (which is almost never addressed in grind), and similar dire topics. Aesthetically, death metal is closely aligned with traditional 70s metal tropes inherited from Black Sabbath.
There are a lot of variations within the genres. For example, grindcore that uses drum machines to achieve crazy tempos and inhuman precision, as seen with the brilliant Agoraphobic Nosebleed, is often called "powerviolence;" bands that mix death metal growling and aggression with modern-rock influenced riffing and tempo have been called "death 'n' roll," which sobriquet is often applied to Entombed.
There's a lot more to it, but that's kind of the two-minute overview. (23,508)
We are entering a world of pain, thanks to the blind adoption of shortsighted food production methods, the insidious creep of food-based biofuels into state policy, and the surprise hegemony of a handful of transnational corporations in the food industry.
Norman Borlaug would have, and probably did, shudder to realize that his agricultural innovations designed to feed starving populations in compromised and suboptimal ecosystems have been bizarrely twisted and misused to shore up the market position of petroleum and wannabe-monopolist agribusiness interests while poisoning the environment and enslaving the same people Borlaug wanted to help.
Monocropping and deeply horrendous meat farming practices are screwing up our food supply, food-into-fuel schemes are driving up the price of tortillas, and vile corporations -- Cargill, Archers Daniels Midland, and Monsanto, in particular -- are exploiting our stupidity to convince us that their diabolical biopatent trolling, ever-expanding dominance of the food supply, and wanton disregard for food security are A-OK.
Oxfam, a group of NGOs whose stated goal is to fight poverty (not, as you'd think from meeting their supporters, to keep tie-dye shirt companies in business), is warning us that thanks to the aforementioned bull$#!%, food prices will skyrocket in the next 20 years. In a situation like ours, where more than 15% of the population is food-insecure already, that is bad mojo.
^ If you want to survive the coming era of food insecurity, you'd better start getting your act together right now. Learn to grow as much of your own food as you can (see our sections on this in the sidebar). Boycott food-into-fuel idiot $#!%. And stop supporting Cargill, Monsanto, Archers Daniels Midland, BASF, and all their buddies and subsidiaries. They get more powerful with every dollar you give them and every monstrous thing you let them get away with.
There is a room where swine from all these companies and their puppet governments are sitting around with stogies and big glasses of Balvenie, guffawing over their victorious campaign to anesthetize and hoodwink an already-apathetic population into giving them all the power over the population's lives. When their vile actions bear fruit as a time of great upset and hardship, I'm going to blame some of the people in that room.
I buy a lot of hard drives. About a month ago I bought two 2tb Samsung (model not important). I put them in a RAID 1 because my spider sense told me one of them was going to fail. Sure enough, today one started making an obscene clicking noise as I was transferring the definitely-not-pirated 1080p versions of Hairy Pooper 1-7 there for long-term archiving. I determined which drive it was, unplugged it, and went on the Samsung site to get my RMA. [Incidentally, I also noted that the drives, both of which were bought from NewEgg, had consecutive serial numbers... FFFFFFUUUUUUUU]
All drives fail, especially big new ones. I bought the 2TB because I was running out of SATA ports (I have roughly 12 hard drives hooked up at any given time) and the price was right at ~$80 each.
Let me set down a basis for comparison here: a couple months ago I had to replace a 1TB Western Digital that was failing on me (sadface). I went on their site, typed in the serial, paid them $5 via credit card, printed out my shipping label, and headed to the UPS store. 10 minutes, including drive time. I also had the option of them just sending me a hard drive immediately while my broken one was in transit (they take a credit card number in case yours doesn't show).
For this Samsung drive, the process was similar apart from they don't offer a loaner drive and no shipping label. This is going to cause me to pay more and lose my drive for a longer period of time. Good thing I don't need something unimportant like say, a hard drive any time soon!
I bet you were expecting an actual review of the features and speed of these mega HDs, I'd say I'm sorry to disappoint, but the reality is: they're big, they're unreliable, and they're not quick at all. The real differences you should look at are price, unmanageable design flaws, and RMA process, since you'll definitely be using it. As far as RMAs go, Samsung is the loser here. (29,258)
"Don't tell me it's OK when it's not OK, Moltar!" - Space Ghost
It's time that we stop pretending that everything is going to be OK. In fact, it's time to stop pretending that anything's going to be OK. As Ewan MacGregor says in "Trainspotting," things are going to be bad. Really bad.
The recent increase in European and US inflationary activity is the first concrete seepage of the massive $#!% flood in which we'll find ourselves swept away when the bizarre monetary policies of the last 3 years bear fruit. When that combines with the effects of our other laughably short-sighted choices over the last several decades, it's going to be a real wild time. I hope you guys are into German-style hyperinflation, because that's the yummy appetizer that will whet our palate for a feast of hardship.
**EDIT : as of May 26, the US economy has officially started grinding to a halt, with economic growth nearly halved to a rate of 1.8% : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13560856 ***
You're already aware that the global economy, and especially the economies of developed countries like the US and UK, are doomed, @#$%ed, and going to completely collapse very soon. For those just tuning in, here's a review :
The reason that the US and European econo-societies are doomed is that the citizen-consumers in those countries, for the better part of a half-century, have cared more about having access to plentiful supplies of cheap goods than they have about their own well-being. So, we've happily supported the corporations as they grew from big, to national, to transnational -- which was enabled by their clever focus on branding as a way to conceal the fact that they were taking jobs, money, and smart people out of our economies and moving them to where it best benefitted their balance sheets. Our emphasis on getting the people decent educations has been a joke, and those that do get educated were diverted to work that produces practically no real value.
Jobs went to slave-labor economies like China and Indonesia, money went to mysterious securities fabricated on Wall Street, and the smart people were lured into designing weapons for sale, psyching consumers into desiring poisonous products, and calculating what could be done to squeeze the last hundreth of a cent out of each transaction.
The corporations own the US government, so they used it to start a few foreign wars of aggression in order to stimulate demand for the corporations' own products like oil, bombs and monocropped food for "foreign aid." In the meantime, the public has merrily gone into debt to finance the corporations and wars; now the debt is owned by grinning smart people in the same countries we "used" to abet our addictions to cheap oil and labor.
The corporations who control global food production have got it fixed so that soon, they'll nearly have a legal monopoly on food by means of biological patents on crops (which don't affect "organic" farmers unless, say, pollen from the engineered crops gets on the organic crops then whoops! Looks like that's some patent infringement, son!), buying all the "organic" food producers, and then tweaking food-labeling rules so that they can sell pretty much whatever they want under any label they want. Not that organic vs conventional marketing is going to make much of a difference when the average consumer is just struggling to survive, of course. And they've had the Third World completely locked into a survival trip of "genetically engineered seeds for high yield need our special fertilizers and pesticides to grow" for decades already.
This has all been going full-steam since the early 1990s, so for twenty years the guys with the plan -- that is, the transnational corporations and their puppet governments -- have been gaining ground. When the average stiff, who'd bought into the consumerist fantasy that the corporations peddled, finally started to get wise (starting at the crash of 2008), the whole thing was a fait accompli.
Fact : things are going to change profoundly and rapidly in the next few years.
Here's how it's going to be : those in control of the corporations will enjoy a high degree of freedom, while everybody else will be de facto slaves. If you're not part of the corporate upper echelon already, don't worry. Unless you have enough money now to become a significant shareholder in a major transnational, there's not really enough time for you to try to join the corporate swine herd in time to avoid becoming a serf (or worse).
Pretty soon, the US and European "markets" will no longer be a good place for the transnationals to hawk their expensive wares, because the vast majority of the population will have had their job outsourced and been unable to learn a skill that would allow them to continue their consumer lifestyle. Those people will have only a subsistence income or none at all. The corporations will still make a killing in America off basic staples like food and shelter, but they'll have to go to Asia to find buyers for their fancy trinkets and signifiers. If the corporations have it planned right -- and the smart money says they do -- they'll stop paying money wages altogether and start trading food and shelter for labor. This arrangement isn't much different from the common arrangement in East Asia, where workers are paid very little in cash while living and eating in dormitory and cafeteria facilities run by the corporation. Throw in a 'company store,' and we're right back to where we were in the first half of America's 20th century.
Which should make you realize that we've only been in an era of mass "prosperity" for a few decades. Turns out that it was just a historical hiccup, a side effect of the fact that we'd created immensely powerful and profitable institutions during and in the wake of World War II, and then fabricated a culture of consumerism to support those institutions. It gave us the illusion of affluence when in fact, we were following the whims of the institutions and becoming dependent on and indebted to them. Like Jason Statham says about the ruthless gangster Brick Top in "Snatch" : "Once you're in his debt, you're in his pocket -- and once you're in that, you're never getting out."
The massive public financing of private corporate debt that was done in 2008 and 2009 kept corporations afloat and swept the suffering of the citizens under the rug. The corporations get bigger and bigger, and turn healthy profits, so pundits and the gullible are hoodwinked into thinking that something called a "recovery" is underway. That's pretty @#$%in' far from the case, though. As the corporations rake in profits and funnel them to other corporations' securities and their own foreign facilities, the condition of the average person deteriorates. When those poor suckers watch TV, though, they hear all about the "recovery" and are hoodwinked into thinking that the problem must be with them or their community.
But why, you may still ask, will the corporations soon control everything and the people be so impoverished? Two reasons : 1) The corporations control the food supply and set its prices; 2) the corporations control the use of forces, whether the putatively "public" armies and law enforcement agencies or their own 'legitimate' security organizations.
Though the most glamorous and vilified transnational corporations are in the energy and weapons industries, the smartest and most dangerous are in the food and water industry. When things get rough, people can go without a car. If they have no choice, they can even go without proper shelter. They can't go long without water or food, though. "Economists" will talk about the slope of demand curves as a measure of how secure the sellers of a good are. When people are starving, the slope of the demand curve for food is just about vertical. The food corporations have also guaranteed that they are practically unbeatable with the aforementioned (and quite insane) genetic patents and the ability to squeeze other industries by controlling the price of food ("Want people to have enough money to buy your widgets? Give us an incentive to keep food prices low"). It should go without saying that controlling the supply of water, as the corporations currently prancing around the globe to buy water rights aim to do, gives one nearly unlimited real power over both people and industry, neither of which can do their thing without water.
It's already been amply demonstrated by the war in Iraq that corporations command the US military; that war was nothing but a mechanism for corporations to sell weapons and support items while raising the price of oil and attempting to secure additional supply of the same for themselves. [Of course, the supply thing didn't work out, but small worry, since that only served to publicly justify their preplanned price increases.] That war also demonstrates that private armies -- like those run by Blackwater / Xe -- are widely deployed in no secret way. Transnational corporations that operate facilities in dangerous places in the "developing" world openly deploy sophisticated security forces already.
A major factor that is happily abetting the complete domination of people and reality by corporations is that supposed conduit of freedom, the digital information revolution. By monitoring your activities on the Internet and when using credit / debit cards, the corporations and their governments build detailed databases about you, giving them really wonderful intelligence about how to best get you to do what they want (which is usually to buy more of their products and ignore the opposition). Naturally, the corporations control the media you consume, so they shape your opinion -- and now with an ever-increasing percentage of people consuming content "on-demand" from the Internet and other digital sources, the corporations can very cleverly design and time their campaigns aimed at you for maxiumum persuasion. This is what we have some of our brightest minds doing right now, engineering these campaigns (good thing they're not trying to figure out how to make it so that, oh I dunno, everybody in America has enough to eat, huh?). The result of this is that pretty much everyone does what the corporations want them to do, which is to consume products and allow whatever behavior the corporations desire.
The fact that we have our smartest people working not to extract us from this horror, but instead to deepen it, shows how badly twisted our system of values and incentives is. These kids should be hard at work developing ways that we can get back a shred of independence or security, but instead they end up as "quants" on Wall Street, creating nonexistent value through manipulation of false assets, or engineers designing Google's latest ad campaign.
All this sounds pretty bad, but there's another factor that hasn't even been mentioned yet : the habitability of our environment. Fortunately for the corporations, we've shown them time and time again that we won't hold them accountable for destroying the ability of our environment to support life. The 2010 BP calamity in the Gulf of Mexico, from which the perpetrator emerged intact as Americans and countless plants and animals died, is just the most recent in a series of examples that prove this. We'll leave a detailed pre-emptive autopsy of our biosphere for another time, but for demonstration purporses, suffice to say this : the oceans are @#$%ed. Really. Go read up on the current condition of the Pacific Ocean. Game over, man.
How did it get so bad right under our noses? It's because the corporations convinced us not to care, saying that we'd be able to continue prancing along in our "Dick Van Dyke" consumer fantasy no matter what happened to those pesky coral reefs or G_d damned bees, and that we could only have it if we let them do whatever they wanted to those things and more. Sounded pretty good at the time! The kicker is that the opposing voices usually hurt more than they helped, as the media focused on the vapid, parroting hippies instead of the scientists who were trying to get a verifiable message across -- and the hippies just made everybody go "aw man, that concern-for-our-environment stuff is hippie claptrap. Everything is hunky-dory!"
But wait, you say! The corporations and their goons suffer just like everyone else when the biosphere can't support life. If it was really that big of a problem, wouldn't they have averted the disaster?
Well, the fact is that they didn't care to. Consumers have never made corporations pay for the 'negative externalities' that their business generates, keeping prices artificially low and not reflecting the true cost of goods. The people who set this catastrophe in motion back in the 1940s through the 1960s knew they'd be dead long before the consequences of their actions even became clearly foreseeable. The evil men who continued on the way of profitable destruction in the 70s and 80s knew they'd be dead before those consequences came to bear. By the time the 1990s hit, people at large were so used to the situation that even the occasional really scary tidbit that made its way into the public view (like, say dead lakes in the Rockies, coral reef death, and bee colony collapse disorder) were pretty much brushed off as alarmist bullfeathers while folks kept swilling their Pepsi, playing golf, and watching "Seinfeld." And now, the people running the show have an inkling that they or at least their kids might be around when the $#!% really hits the fan, but they've been so conditioned by the corporate mindset to pay attention to the near term that they just don't give a hoot. "Hey, live for today, right?"
So get ready, guys. If you're lucky in a few years, you and your kids will be making Nikes for the Chinese market while choking down expensive and barely-nutritive food. If you're not, well, I hope you've been brushing up on your Boy Scout skills and are good at avoiding capture, because you'll have to live off a poisoned land while its owners try to arrest you for theft and trespassing.
No kidding. Hope you enjoyed the last 20 years of living in a nice house, driving a big car, and drinking all the "Capri Sun" your vile little palate desired. I know I did. (29,480)
The Japanese have a lot of bad stuff to answer for : cell-phone text messaging, deadly Toyotas, that whole Nanking thing. But there's one thing they do very, very well nearly every time : Rock 'n' roll.
My very favorite band of all time, Guitar Wolf, hails from Osaka. '90s hipster kids will remember the outstanding pop-punkers Shonen Knife and the fascinating pastiche-rock of Buffalo Daughter. Sludge fanatics adore Corrupted. And who can forget the grand kings of post-Velvets avant-dada anything-goes tribalism, the Boredoms?
There's a lot of speculation about why the Japanese create such consistently great rock. Some speculate that it's because they take in American and English rock traditions through some kind of unique Day-Glo cultural filter and expectorate them as intensely focused hypercaricatures. Some say that the surface conservatism and repression of Japanese mainstream society means that free-for-all outlets like rock 'n' roll are used with wild abandon -- a situation analagous to 1950s America.
Whatever the reason, when drums and attitude are involved, these cats know how to do the damn thing. Case in point : Boris.
Boris is a trio whose music is usually some kind of experimental metal. They frequently change their pitch up*, so every Boris album (hell, every track) is pretty different. Lately, they've begun to head in a weird conventional pop direction, but let's concentrate on the matter at hand : their 1998 LP "Amplifier Worship."
"Amplifier Worship" is both superbly meritorious in its own right and of considerable historical interest. It's pretty evident that Sunn0))), who would later collaborate with Boris, were taking notes while listening to this record, as was pretty much every act who'd later incorporate black metal voice and atmospherics into other styles. With this unsettling and modern disc, Boris helped the doom genre evolve into something more than a retro Black Sabbath-aping craze.
This record is usually hailed by old-school freaks as one of the most vital releases in the history of fringe metal. This five-song masterpiece contains elements of drone-doom, black metal, speed metal, and hardcore punk, but Boris puts thier inexpressibly unique stamp on everything here. "Amplifier Worship" should be considered a genre unto itself.
This LP is dominated by pounding drums and bleak, distant, uber-distorto guitars, weaving extended, brain-scrambling songforms. It is an epic experience. Not in the trite and meaningless 21st-century nerdgoon sense ("That PBR-marinated grilled cheese sandwich was epic FTW!"), but in the literal sense that it's a long, twisting, eventful narrative of massive scope.
The opening cut, "Huge," is my idea of the definitive Boris track. Aptly named, "Huge" is a lumbering beast of blackened drone-doom that drags you deep into its suffocating lair and there's no escape. The following "Ganbou-Ki" buries the listener in sludge before offering a breather of ambient sounds -- then it plunges back in even heavier than before.
The next two cuts, "Hama" and "Kuruimizu," are crusty noise-punk pieces whose vocals are shouted rather than harshly screamed. Both eventually break down into meditative dirges, with "Kuruimizu" eventually taking on a creepy horror-movie quality. "Hama" devolves into something approaching conventional doom. The shifting atmosphere of these songs sets an uneasy mood, setting you up for the crusher that awaits.
The final cut, "Vomitself," is the most profoundly revolting doom track ever recorded. Mostly drumless, sparsely populated with anguished screams, this song evokes deep loathing and a disgust with no possibility of forgiveness. Waves and whirlpools of volume and cicuit agony overwhelm you. Its empty guitar drones communicate numbness and void that will penetrate your bones and brain. If this tune comes on when you're feeling depressed, it might suck the will to live right out of you.
In short -- if you're looking for moody metal that doesn't even acknowledge, let alone follow, preconceived notions about genre and style, put "Amplifier Worship" on your to-do list. See you in hell! (28,311)
There are some perfect things that remain in this corrupt and poisoned world. Matisse's "Icarus." The mighty saguaro cactus. Thora Birch's hooters. An open road at midnight.
Add to that list Zeke's 1996 LP "Flat Tracker." This brief shock of rat-rodding perfection is the ideal Platonic form of a speed-punk-metal record. Taking Motorhead's formula and applying it to sub-Ramones song lengths and Beach-Boys-on-crank lyrics, leader Blind Marky Felchtone and his zoomed-out crew deliver the funnest, fastest, and most frenetic album of its kind.
With a deadly exactitude that makes Metallica's "Kill 'Em All" sound like the Kingsmen, "Flat Tracker" just roars with raw rock 'n' roll attitude. The guitars have the revving-engine buzzsound that makes you feel like you've got dust in your mouth, and Felchtone spits his single-minded lyrics with a speed and precision usually found on records by Twista and Busta Rhymes. If Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were born 20 years later and had access to a huge stash of goofballs, this is the LP they'd make.
Like most classic albums, "Flat Tracker" knocks you out straight away with a trio of unbelievably great songs : "T500," "Eddie Hill," and the slower-yet-hard-as-heck burner "Chiva Knievel." These three are so outta sight that I could listen to them on repeat all day (and I have!). With average song length hovering near the one-minute mark, you don't have time to think -- you just get transported to the dirty, hormone-sodden local racetrack and rammed headfirst into the bleachers.
There are plenty of other great tunes on here -- "Daytona," "Fight in the Storeroom," "Flat Track." The concept and execution of every tune is flawless and tightly-focused. There is a nasty adolescent edge to this record that will bring back (or accompany the formation of) memories of sticky car seats, hot Thursday afternoons, raw lust mixed with hate, grape soda, confused nebulous fear, and cheap cigarettes. In short, it's just glorious. Like "Shizuo vs Shizor," this is an LP that you have gotta get before you're too old and your heart freezes up. Find it now! (29,705)
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