I went back onto the trail today. My goal was to find if it was better to start hiking at the end of Liberty Canyon rather than from Juan Batista de Anza park in Calabasas. It turns out that on both distance and time it’s about the same, though it’s easier to get to Liberty and the parking is better, especially on weekends.
Averaging 18,000 steps and around 40 floors climbed on each of my last three hikes I have concluded that I am in lousy shape. Everything held up Ok until today when my bad knee felt crappy by the time I got back to the car.
Hmmm…
If I’m going to do 15 miles in a day, let alone 30 over two days, I’ll have to be in better shape otherwise I’ll be hurting’ after such a fun couple of days.
Later, we went to a concert at First United Methodist Church in Pasadena. It was done by Pittance Chamber Society and featured music by Ingolf Dahl, Barbara Kolb and one of my favorite contemporary composers, Arvo Pärt. I hate to be biased, but the the piece by Pärt, Spiegel Im Spiegel was worth the price of admission all by itself. The acoustics at the church are marginal though it’s a lovely place to walk into. It was built in 1924, the same year as many of the larger churches in Pasadena. I have no idea what was special about churches and Pasadena in 1924. The room is slightly diffuse sounding. It’s very difficult to localize instrumental sounds and timbres tend to blend together in a less than pleasing way. I recall it was better for choral groups so perhaps the room simply needs more energy to really come alive. Anyway, it was a rare pleasure to actually attend a concert, any concert, with things as they are. I hope it’s a sign of more good things to come over 2022.
Tonight’s writing soundtrack is Tabula Rasa, by Arvo Pärt. It’s fantastic…
It occurs to me that I could be shouting into the wind with this journal. But, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that it doesn’t matter even if I am. Even though writing is for readers if the work doesn’t serve the needs of the writer, in some way, I cannot imagine it being worthwhile. Writers, at least this writer, are disinclined to think of the wants of others before they think of their own needs.
I’m kidding, but just barely.
Today I was thinking about my maternal grandmother, Mary, not my sister, Mary. She was an unusual woman. I think of her as hard rather than unloving. Perhaps she was an example of one who showed her love by action and not so much by word. When she spoke to me, or any of her grandchildren, she sounded as if she was talking to a gas station attendant; matter of fact trending toward blunt.
Still, I never heard of her being mean spirited to anyone and that surely counts for a lot.
Her actions, especially those that came before I was born, showed spirit and love. During the depression she was known to invite men who had found their way to the family’s door and knocked upon it, looking for food, into her kitchen to share their modest dinner. I can imagine my grandmother doing this in the very same matter-of-fact way she might have spoken to a gas station attendant or decades later, a grandchild. One time she even gave a pair of her husband’s work boots away to a man whose shoes had holes so large that the snow of the Iowa winter found its way easily to the man’s bare feet. I heard about this from my grandfather who recalled the time my grandmother gave away the very boots on his feet.
My grandmother corrected him immediately, telling everyone in the room not to believe my grandfather. He had another pair of work boots and he knew it, my grandmother said. He was lucky to have two pair of boots, neither of which had holes in their soles. When she spoke, it sounded like she was taking to a gas station attendant.
Even so, I wouldn’t say that I knew my grandmother Mary all that well, but then again maybe I did. Maybe the way she treated people and the way she spoke to them contained a lesson that’s easy to miss. Actions are hard while words can be easy. I cannot imagine knocking on a door, looking for food. Perhaps that is my own failing, my inability to conceive a world where I am the one in need. My grandmother knew she could have easily been the one knocking on the door, desperate to feed her children. And she knew that even though her own family barely had enough to eat, and lacked enough coal to stave off the cold, that others had even less.
She gave what she could, as we all should.
Tonight’s writing soundtrack is Headlights from Charlie Cunningham’s Flesh & Bone Studio Session (Live) from 2019. Covid caused us to miss a chance to see Cunningham near the end of last year at the Fonda in Hollywood but I hope we’ll get another chance to see and hear him during better times.
His music is elemental, elegant, deceptively simple, beautiful and more than a little haunting.
Thanks, as always, for reading. Shouting into the wind’s not so bad after all.
“Hi Paul…… I certainly have fond memories of when we worked together with Roger M. While I find your daily invasions annoying… I can’t stop …your writing is addictive…you have turned me onto a few great artists as well… All the best my friend!”
The writer was a friend and business associate of mine from way back when. How far is way back? I’m pretty sure the last time we were in the same room year year began with the number 19.
Yup, way back when.
Bobby was in town, after CES I think, and we went out to share a couple cocktails after dinner since he was staying somewhere in Pasadena. At some point he made a comment about how little green there was in SoCal. Having spent my share of time in the midwest and a little on the east coast I knew he was right. But still, what he said took me back a little. Not enough green?
Winter is not exactly SoCal’s colorful season. A few weeks or so from now this canyon may have some color to it, if we luck out with rainfall. It was a fascinating coincidence for me to hike this gray canyon the same day that I heard from Bobby and recalled his comment about our lack of green.
Even in relatively wet years the green comes quickly and leaves even faster. It’s just something we get used to. Who knows? Maybe we treasure the little bits of green we get all the more?
I can remember being on this fire road only a few weeks earlier. The short season grasses were as green as rye and flooded onto the fire road itself. By late February, when this photo was taken, those grasses were already well into retreat. At least the oak leaves bring a little green to the scene.
We’re off to Sacramento this weekend. I think they’ve been getting some rain and I know the Sierra snowpack is off to a good start. Still, I’m not looking forward to seeing much in the way of green.
Maybe someday I’ll get back to upstate New York and Bobby can show me what green really looks like. I would enjoy that but mostly I would enjoy the chance to spend time with him. I miss Bobby and all the other good guys from the high end game. Those were interesting days and the good guys, like Bobby, were some of the best guys ever.
By the way, even though I’m on vacation for a few days, the blog is not. I’ll be writing on my iPhone (always a joy) so my posts won’t be long but since there are 365 days this year I’m writing 365 posts.
Plus, how could I miss out on a chance to annoy an old friend?
Wait, I almost forgot about today’s writing soundtrack. It’s the 2020 release of Brian & Roger Eno’s Mixing Colours. It’s gratifying that folks like the Eno brothers can still create this kind of atmospheric music with such freshness and style after all these years.
My favorite watercolorist is also my friend, Alba Escayo. She and I go way back. I think we found each other on Elance which is now Upwork. Yup, a classic internet mogul move; change a good name to a lousy one. Alba lives and works in Spain. She created the cover on my first novel and I wanted her to create the cover on Cottonwood as well. I’m always grateful she’s younger than I am because it means she’ll be around to create the cover artwork for every book I write, if she’s willing and I am able.
I had an idea that involved a Cottonwood tree and a figure carrying a golf bag and walking away from the viewer. From underneath the tree, the figure reaches up and touches the low-hanging leaves. The idea of the walking away is that the figure is walking into the future, like all of us. The figure is faceless. It could be anyone. It could be one of the characters in the book but then again maybe not. No matter who it is, he reaches up to touch the tree, to touch a growing life.
I sent Alba an example of my idea but I did a bad job of explaining my vision to her. Probably I was in a hurry or maybe I thought we had discussed it more completely last time we emailed about it, over a year ago. She sent me this a couple days ago:
Now I have a problem, not a bad problem mind you, more like a decision. This is not at all what I had in mind, but I love it. It’s not a golf book so I had no intention of having an image of someone swinging a golf club on the cover, but there it is. And, now that it’s there, it has me doubting my concept. I’ve been reminding myself of some of my best non-advice advice:
It doesn’t really matter.
Of course it does, but maybe not. I wanted Alba to create the cover because I love her work, and this is her work. Now I find myself hesitant to continue to foist my vision on her, especially after she’s blessed me with this beautiful creation. My concept is not the idea of a visual artist but rather of a lowly writer. Part of me is screaming at myself to leave the artwork to the artist, and that is definitely Alba and definitely not me.
But we are talking about me. So, in the end I couldn’t help myself and I emailed Alba with my thoughts. As I said, I love the cover she’s done, and I want it, and I’ll pay her for it gladly. It will hang proudly over my desk and I will smile each time I see it. It may not end up being the artwork I use on the cover and then again it might be.
The decisions made in writing a book, especially a self-published book, go on and on. I’m very happy that no matter what decision I make about the cover art, the work will be Alba’s and it will be fantastic because it is hers.
Today’s writing soundtrack is an elegant 1974 record by Bills Evans called, Symbiosis. It is some of the best of jazz and classical (read: orchestral) music I have ever heard. It is melodically and rhythmically evocative of both times and places I’d like to be. I know a pianist who doesn’t think much of Bill Evans’ work from this era, but I think it is wonderful. Maybe you will, too, so take a listen.
I’m writing early today for two reasons. One’s not so pleasant. I woke up with a bit of stomach upset. This has kept me indoors and forced me to move my hike to the late afternoon, or more likely tomorrow.
Annoying.
The other reason is a bittersweet one. I have brought a new computer into my small livery of Macs. It took me a while to decide on another MacBook Air. Part of the delay was caused by me not quite being able to face reality. You see, my previous MacBook Air, or what I have been calling my new computer is now 11 years old. The nice folks at Apple must have heard it was still running strong so they decided to force my hand by disallowing further upgrades of the Safari browser. That, among other things, made it difficult to access and use the WordPress UI and dodgy sites like Wikipedia.
Well, that’s a pisser.
My old new MacBook Air; not quite ready for retirement.
No, I don’t have any micro brewery stickers on my new Mac…yet. It’s Space Gray, fast, silent and seems just dandy so far. It and my other (can’t quite say old) MacBook Air have helped solidify an evolution of sorts when it comes to how I use computers. There was a time when I stuffed my Macs full of everything; photos, files, music. In fact, in my office is an even older MacMini with a 1TB SSD. It’s full of music and photos and pretty much everything you can imagine. But lately, really since I bought my old-new MacBook Air, I’ve reversed that process. I have a paid subscription to Flickr so most of my photos live there. The Word docs of my books exist on various computers and GoogleDrive and in a host of email accounts. Word files are neat since they’re so small. Storing them is really no problem.
Music presents the biggest challenge and you know I’m not done figuring it out. Every CD I own has been uploaded to the MacMini but how long will I have access to them? The Mini’s ancient OS is getting more hampered by the passage of time every day. It’s only a matter of time, but that’s a worry for another day. For now, it makes it impossible to bring myself to selling off my CDs, which I would really like to do.
So, I have no plans to activate and authorize my iTunes account on my new computer, let alone store any music on it. My iPhone is right here and so is much of my music and everything on the MacMini via Home Sharing is available so long as I’m on my home WiFi.
No, no access to my LPs but that, too, is a subject for another time.
If things follow the plan, there really won’t be much stored locally on my new MacBook Air but I still intend to get a lot of use out it, as I have all of my Macs going back so many years. Most have been great computers, though there were exceptions like a Graphite iMac that liked to power down whenever it wanted and its replacement, a G4 tower that decided powering up wasn’t all that important.
The Macs I’ve owned since have been universally good, but they, like their owner, get old, do less and eventually get put out to pasture. My worst Apple disappointment had to be my iPhone 8. What a great phone, until it unceremoniously failed to work one morning. It sits, still, on my CD shelf; now a very expensive paperweight, but let’s not focus on the negative.
My other MacBook Air is now renamed the Bedtime Surfer, since I anticipate it will spend most of the rest of its days under my bed, waiting for me to use it in those minutes before I put out the lights.
I only wish it had room for a few more beer stickers.
Oh yeah, today’s writing soundtrack is Sometimes Just the Sky by Mary Chapin Carpenter. I’ve heard her name spoken for years but never really listened to her music until recently.
This record makes me realize I’ve been missing something special.
Oh sure, you might get rich. You may be another Stephen King or J.K. Rowling but before you are you will to do some of the most hateful work imaginable, and I don’t mean you’ll write your novel.
No, you will edit and proof your novel and you will hate the process, as we all do.
Today I excised 49 scene headings. While I did I made sure their removal didn’t make the overall line flow get screwy. It did in many instances but overall the process was less onerous than I anticipated. And, less onerous is always a big win when it comes to this kind of thing.
My next task was to create the front matter. This was relatively painless since I have decided not to have a foreword and a dedication in Cottonwood…just more stuff to write and edit, don’t you know. Really, though, I simply don’t have anyone in mind for the dedications beyond myself for being silly enough to launch into this book so soon after my first novel was up for sale. Those 49 scene heading were used to help me stay aware of where I was in the book relative to its sequencing and also when it came to editing and being aware of my proximity to other elements of the plot. They were replaced by four sections entitled I Spring, II Summer, III Fall & IV Winter. I can’t really tell you why other than the nature of the story causes it to move through the four seasons almost exactly. That was not by design, but it works or at least I think it does.
The only lesson here is to plan as much as possible and then be willing to abandon your plans as your book demands. The moment you worship the what you plan to do it over what the story and your characters need all of you are doomed. Plan away, by all means. Figure out systems that make your project make sense and seem manageable. Just be ready to be flexible because you surely will have to be if your loyalty remains where it belongs.
Today and tonight’s writing soundtrack is Olivia Chaney’s The Longest River from 2015. You’ll note the last two evenings have found me listening to two vocalists, last night Tim Curry and Chaney tonight. I can explain it like this. I wasn’t really writing yesterday or today. I was editing and that process seems to shift my brain’s gears in a way that makes it possible to divide my attention to the words Chaney sings in Loose Change without losing my sense of what I’m trying to accomplish. Also, vocals do their part to keep me company while I’me doing something that’s even more lonely than writing creatively. Anyway, Chaney has a lovely voice and the arrangements are very elegant. Some of the tracks on The Longest River are among the most beautiful I’ve ever heard.
In my life I’ve stored music on LP, CDs and cassettes. 8-track? Nope, I never went down that rabbit hole, not even in the bad old days of Madman Muntz. Cassettes are miserable. They suffer from nasty compression (though some like a more compressed sound) but, worse, even commercial cassettes were prone to stretching and print-through. I did have an early fondness for making my own cassettes from radio broadcasts of classical and jazz back in the 70s. Some of them sounded Ok, especially when they were new. I found a cache of them in the basement of my parents house when they died back in 2008. I thought, for a brief moment, about trying to play one of them but quickly thought better of it…another rabbit hole avoided.
Me? I choose bigger and better rabbits holes like LP, CD and now digital music. LPs used to rule my world like dinosaurs. It was very difficult to listen to CDs when you have easy access to a quality LP playback system and good LPs. But, CDs got better and at a fairly rapid rate. Digital music is hurtling forward in quality. Even everyday bluetooth (especially later versions). Technologies like Qualcomm’s aptX will just keep on coming. Now, just as a brief reality check even aptX taps out at the limits of commercial CD (16 bit / 44.1 kHz) which is good but even better is sure to follow. This reality causes my enthusiasm for LPs to hold steady if not lose a little steam. Hey, as luscious as LPs are to hold, play and listen to I don’t like the feeling of emphasizing the medium over the music.
Good LPs, those pressed from virgin vinyl are extremely durable. I have records from the 70s that have been played thousands of times that still sound fantastic. The records themselves will certainly last well over a century (absent another flood). Until recently I’m not sure the same could be said of CD. Some early CDs suffered from fatal de-lamination. I have no doubt that the materials will be stable for the same century plus. The encouraging recent development I referred to earlier was the sudden increase in the availability of new one-box CD players. For a while it was looking like buyers would have to settle for a DVD player (until those went the way of the dinosaur) or a more elaborate and expensive two-box (transport/DAC) solution. I haven’t heard any of the new CD players but I’m sure they’re all good to excellent. Everyone has access to superb chips today and that’s a win for everyone. My suspicion is that most two-box solutions from smaller companies use chip sets that are inferior to those used by the big boys. That’s just how it is when it is comes to digital. If you can’t buy in quantity you have to get by on less.
So, both CDs and LPs are archive quality. But both formats take up space and it’s starting to annoy me. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about where that annoyance is taking me.
By the way, it hit 64 today with 70 on tap for tomorrow. I like the sound (and feel) of that!
Yesterday, I laid out the raw numbers of my current music collection. There are a few hundred LPs and maybe 500-600 CDs. But wait, I’ve forgotten about the digital music from iTunes, Bandcamp and even a small smattering of music I bought from Amazon. Each purchase has one thing in common; it is as available and reliable as the company that has granted the me use rights to the music.
Like pretty much all rights, iTunes rights are beset by limitations. Hey, .99 cents (now $1.29) only buys you but so much. Let me tell you the story of a handful of songs I purchased by a fairly obscure singer named Brendan Campbell (from his 2008 record, Burgers and Murders). I bought the songs from iTunes quite a while back. But, earlier this year when I tried to play them I found that the songs were MIA (at least on my iPhone).
Well, that’s weird thought I…
Once I was back in my home office I checked my master iTunes library, which resides on the lovely if aged, 1TB drive of my elderly MacMini. There the missing songs were right where they were supposed to be, ready to play.
The cover of Campbell’s 2008 record…
WTF?
It took me and Mr. Google a couple minutes to solve this minor league tech puzzler. The answer resides not so much with iTunes but rather with the license granted to them by Mr. Campbell. It seems the two had a spat of some sort and the result is that iTunes can no longer sell (or allow access to) Campbell’s music even though I had previously purchased the songs.
The only reason I still have the songs is because a long time ago I downloaded (remember that 1TB drive?) the songs in question. If I had left them to float around the digital ether all this time the songs would be gone forever, or at least until Campbell’s work pops up somewhere else. Going forward who can say whether the rights granted by iTunes, et al are ephemeral or long standing?
I raise this issue because it serves to emphasize how important it is to have a downloaded, nailed-down (read residing on an actual hard drive you own) version of all the music you own. Sure, Campbell’s music comprises a financial investment of exactly $5.94 but the point is that I cannot find that music anywhere else, at least not as of this writing. The loss of those songs would go beyond the mere pittance I originally spent on them.
In the end, a valued music collection has to be archivable.
More on that tomorrow. By the way, it actually warmed up fairly well in the valley today. The mercury made it all the way to 64 today.
2020 was a year that I started to try to get a handle on my music collection. Years ago I lost over 2,000 treasured LPs in a flood. The insurance company first offered me $1 per record and ended up paying me $3 each. Still, that pretty much took out my collection save for the few hundred that escaped the hot, ravaging waters of the broken pipe.
A few of the survivors and my beloved Per Madsen Rack.
I would include a photo of my CDs, but they’re just so boring looking. Yesterday I wrote about Paul Simon’s disdain for contemporary music and I alluded to my music collection. I find that the more I write the more music I listen to. The listening is different, for the most part, than when I worked in and wrote about the high end audio industry. It is more of an accompaniment or a soundtrack. I no longer have a system, though I can still play LPs and CDs and hear them in free space. When the music or my brain demands it I listen on headphones, either wired or bluetooth. This is all heading toward how I intend to manage and grow my collection without as much physical mass to manage. The idea of using FLAC and dumping what’s left of my LPs onto a bunch of really big (an well backed up) hard drive is appealing. So is buying most (but not all of my music digitally through either iTunes or Bandcamp. I can’t quite wrest myself from the appeal of the physical so when I bought Deep Sea Diver’s new record I bought the LP from Bandcamp and it arrived signed by Jessica Dobson herself. Plus, Bandcamp tends to pay musicians a high percentage than iTunes.
C’mon, Jessica sent me Xs and Os…How do you pass that up?
It’s cool, but it’s also pretty damn physical. There may come a day where my enjoyment of buying and listening to records goes away altogether but I am not quite there yet. Digital and digital storage is just so convenient and it usually sounds fairly good. There’s a good chance one of the few benefits of aging will be the fact that my ability to discern good sound from bad sound will continue to decline. If I end up being happy to listen to a portable radio that’ll be just fine. My hearing already rolls off above 14kHz so I’m on my way!
Enough preamble. The word of the day is nostalgia. And my question is this: If you like something that happens to be old is your appreciation inherently possessed with nostalgia? What do we say when what’s old is really good let alone possible better than what’s new? Say we’re talking about Van Halen’s 1978 eponymously titled record or Steely Dan’s Katy Lied from 1975. Yup, I grew up with both. Still, each record is still fantastic by any measure. Do I have to admit that some of my appreciation for either work is dripping in nostalgia? Think about it and let me know. More tomorrow. I’m trying to keep the daily posts between 300-400 words. Wish me luck…
People are always telling me that I should blog about things everyone wants to read about.
So, I thought about it and I came up with the subject of microphonics, so-called cable microphonics specifically. Those of you who read (over and over, I’m sure) Wires, Baby! know I’ve recently slipped the bounds of the 21st century and gone back to wired earbuds because for the most part they simply sound better.
Now, oddly, inexplicably I’ve found that a good number of wired earbuds suffer from what’s been called in many corners microphonics.
When people say this they referring to hearing extraneous bass coming through their earbuds, such as the sound of their own footsteps, as they walk.
It can be damned annoying and some decent buds are let down by this. The problem is that it’s not actually microphonics. As pretty much all of you know, microphonics are when a mechanical/acoustic object generates an unintended electrical signal that’s amplified and heard during playback.
The oldest example of this is in relatively high gain small signal phono tubes. The 12AU7/ECC82 was notorious for this, but any small-signal tube that is part of a circuit with enough gain could suffer from this effect. And, as an aside to you tube guys, the 12AU7 is really not appropriate for use in a phono circuit when there are so many dandy 12X7 and 6922s laying around.
Just saying.
A more recent example is the stylus/cartridge assembly of a turntable being excited by in-room low frequencies that looped those frequencies right back through the system with predictable non-musical results.
In contemporary parlance the word microphonics has been applied to the cables of IEMs and earbuds but that’s not truly what’s going on.
The thud effect is induced by at least these factors:
1 The profile of the cable, with so-called tangle-free cables (often those with a roughly rectangular cross sections) being especially likely to exacerbate the problem.
2) The durometer of the cable’s exterior jacket and to a lesser degree its dielectric (if it’s separate from the jacket, which it usually isn’t). Harder and stiffer make it worse where usually they make things better.
Go figure.
3) The degree of the acoustic seal that the earbud tips create within the ear and/or ear canal.
What this means is that what is heard is a simple drum effect, not actual microphonics. This can be proven quite easily. Simply tap on your earbud’s cables with your device on mute, or even turned off.
Yup, thud, thud, thud.
What’s interesting is that some brands (Apple) figured this out years ago. The cables on their modestly priced buds don’t suffer this kind of annoying drum effect at all. Other brands like Beats (one wonders why didn’t they just ring up their cousins over at Apple for help with this) and Skullcandy can’t be bothered to eliminate such a simple mechanical problem.
I also understand that Etymotic Research is plagued with this in their $300 ER4SR IEMs.
Come on, folks. You have the word research right in your name so go do some!
Look, personal audio has come very far very fast and we’re all loving it. But let’s not be so focused on making the world a better place that we miss fixing easy problems that ruin the music.
Paul Cervantes 