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http://nopeanutsinchurch.com

Prep.

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The turnable saga continues. The headshells came, they look pretty good. Slightly heavier than the one that came with the Stanton, but not by much. They’ll do. The new cartridge/needle assembly also came, as did the rubber mat, and the new USB audio interface. That all gets assembled tomorrow.

I did have some time to unbox the USB audio interface (Behringer UFO202) I’d ordered. It’s smaller than a deck of cards and has the USB cable permanently attached. Plugged it into the Win7 laptop, drivers auto-installed, etc. Didn’t get to do much more than fire up Audacity and verify that I could access the device from that. I also sampled a few seconds with no inputs attached to the little box, to get its nominal noise profile. I have the plot (strange noise profile for an audio device– peaks in weird places that don’t seem to correlate to freqs I’d expect to see coming from the power supply, sampling rate, etc). Max noise peaks at -63dB or so, most of the curve lies below that. (Note to self: Post a plot later once you figure out how to embed). I want to get a longer audio sample of this base noise anyway, so I can use it for reference noise later should that ever be needed.

Also played with some of the earlier ‘throwaway data’ I’d captured using the Stanton’s built-in USB preamp. (Audacity again). The original still sounded as horribly tinny as it did the other night, but was also not too difficult to clean up and EQ. Before long I had managed to make the sample much less horrible than it was. Not a great record here, some generic-looking album from the late 50s/early 60s full of ‘Spanish Orchestral Classics’. I might end up seeing if I can do something useful with the string sounds (this assumes that I manage to recover anything interesting).

Assembly tomorrow. Probably.

Spinnin’ Wheel.

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Well, it’s done.  Ordered a Stanton T.92 turntable (USB), and it came the next day.  Decided to go with a DJ-style turntable because it would (1) Probably be more physically robust, (2) be easier to set up and more forgiving in actual use, and (3) I’m using this for sampling, not archiving.

I wanted the precision in pitch & tempo of a direct-drive motor, ‘hrumble’ be damned (for that, after all, can be notched out or otherwise altered– again, not archiving).  I only played with it a little to verify that I could set it up and balance it well enough to just coherently play a record, and it seemed easy enough.  Even though I went out of the way to get a turntable with USB conversion as a built-in, it turns out that the built-in phono preamp isn’t very good.  Too… metallic, is how I’d describe it. Too much upper-midrange, very tinny or brassy. (This was with Audacity on a cheap Windows laptop… later this week I’ll try hooking it up to the Mac and see if the sound is any better). The turntable also has phono (ie raw) outputs, as well as RCA line outs and coax s/pdif (the latter two reportedly use the same built-in phono preamp as the USB stage does). Part of why I picked this one, I can hook it up to anything.

That said, I was in the market for a cheap USB audio interface with RCA inputs anyway.  This morning, lo and behold, this Behringer interface (with built-on RIAA phono EQ setting) went on sale today, so I grabbed one.  While cheap, it has reportedly better freq response than the built-in, and I’ll have other uses for it (eg tape in/out) once I get to the point of using a mixer again.

Also ordered a rubber mat for the Stanton (a perfectly fine felt one was included, should my midlife crisis ever lead to an extremely unlikely second career in scratch).  Also some cheap generic headshells (at less than $8/pc) and an Audio-Technica cartridge that reads like it will have a freq-response/tone more to my liking.

I’m going to hold off on getting a cart for 78rpm just yet.  For one thing, I don’t have enough 78s collected yet to make it worth the expense. Soon.  Before they all disappear.  But all in all, I’m essentially done acquiring the turntable stuff, since I already have all the software I need.  I had budgeted $500 total for the setup, and came in under that.  It’ll do.

Back to the turntable itself: It was strange to unbox this thing in 2012.  While I’m plenty old enough to have grown up with records, I never had a ‘stereo system’ with a ‘turntable’.  Like any other 1970s Boston kid, I had a ‘rekkid playa’, upon which we could play our ‘rekkidz’.  By today’s standards, these little stereo systems were tinny little plastic things that skipped, sucked, sounded perhaps slightly better than AM radio, and destroyed records.  But we didn’t seem to care.

I don’t think I even heard the word ‘turntable’ used in the modern sense until the early-80s, when high-end direct-drive Technics became the status/class marker of choice amongst the college set.   To this day, the Technics (and its many clones) still come in the dull silver-grey that used to signify high-end consumer electronics 25 years ago.  I was too busy playing with guitars and computers back then to notice that the turntable had become an instrument, in its own right, almost a decade before.

Now… to find more rekkidz.

21st Century Fripp

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Financial Times has a short but good interview with the inimitable Robert Fripp. The most recent music I had heard from him was A Blessing of Tears and 1999 (more soundscapes were made later on, in the early-00’s as well… need to find those). From the tone of the article, Fripp does appear to have semi-retired, however:

“My life as a professional musician […] is a joyless exercise in futility.”

With Fripp at 66, the FT article’s more interested in the looking-back of a grizzled old prog-rock icon than in talking about contemporary music, which is a shame. I know he did some work with the early Orb back in the day. I would have liked to have heard his opinion on current idm/e-music (if he had any). Instead, the usual Fripp interview about the absurdity of the music industry in its business aspects. (I have an old issue of Guitar Player from the mid-1980s around here somewhere, where he gives an interview saying much the same thing). That said, Universal has (allegedly) been unkind to him in its handling of distribution and download rights.

Whenever I look back on music I liked, or music I tried to ‘borrow from’, or music I didn’t necessarily like but at least understood What Was Being Attempted, it often ends up traced back to Fripp or Eno…. either their work, directly, or once or twice removed. Eno coined the old joke about the Velvet Underground: That hardly anyone bought any of their albums at the time, but those who did all seem to have started bands. Fripp and Eno, in much the same way, tend to fall into the Subset of Darlings for most bedroom-and-basement e-musicans, pro or otherwise. I’m even old enough to remember when those names were a kind of ‘litmus test’, to be used to identify the like-minded. Mention one name or the other, see the reaction. Maybe have a conversation.

Sweet youth… and long-gone days, of course. Long-gone enough that I can’t find much of the stuff online (I just spent much of the morning looking). And while Amazon has some of the CD’s of the Soundscape stuff, they appear to be out of print and somewhat expensive because of this. Guess I’ll be hanging on to what I have.

Fripp’s company/collective, Discipline Global Mobile has a good website with lots of assorted, relevant links & goodies: Here. There’s a King Crimson fan site/wiki, as well.

Back to the Future.

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Surrounded by all the bits and pieces now. Now I just need to pick them all up and put them all back together again.

Got a good deal on ACID Pro 7 yesterday, surprisingly so.  I had used it from very early Jan 2002 until March of that year, when I switched over to the little white Apple iBook (I’ve stuck with the Mac for audio ever since).  But with my beloved, trusty old 2007-vintage iMac starting to fail, and my only laptop of the moment this Win7 machine, I decided to see how much ACID had changed since back then.

It can record audio tracks now, it couldn’t then– a big part of why I abandoned it I think.  The MIDI tracking was slow on the hardware of the day, too (WinXP audio/MIDI had always been a little flaky for me, another reason I switched over).  I haven’t tried recording any guitar tracks with this setup yet, or importing/playing with any vox samples.  Maybe next week.

I did manage to preserve some archives from that time, so I have this very odd feeling of picking up exactly where I left off a little over ten years ago.  Like unlocking a long-abandoned office, to find your old abandoned desk with your old abandoned pen still sitting, undisturbed, on your old, abandoned pad of paper, exactly as you had left them.  Patiently waiting for you to come back and finish.

To its credit, ACID can still open files from so many versions past.  And I found… Drums. Weird Processed Drums. Lots of Weird Processed Drums.  (And I had gotten a little farther with the program than I had remembered).  Also found the Masters for two pieces from that era that I might end up reworking.  (Or at least taking apart, so I can remember how I made them).

I can’t find anything recorded in ACID (or on the PC at all) after early February 2002, so I really did just abruptly stop working on the PC for some reason.  Got the iBook in March 2002, so I was using the then-new Ableton Live before too long, anyway (late June or early July).  I do know that by mid-summer, I had given up trying to work with Drums altogether, and had moved over to pulses, noises, effects and drones.

But that’s another story.

The Empire of the Senseless.

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There are a lot of Wise Fools in media; on the television, on the radio, arguably even more of them out here in the blogipelago. Alleged domain-level experts (who just so happen to be lifelong career conservatives), always with some authoritative title from a well-funded institution after their name. I’m sure this intellectual niche has always existed, but since the mid-1990s or so (roughly about the time when panel-based journalism because the norm) it does seem to have gotten more endemic. No truly fair and balanced panel discussion on cable news is complete without one or two of these on the panel.  There’s good money in it.  Nice stable work, if you can get it.

If the topic is Climate Change, you can count on at least one Climate Change denier, appropriately credentialed and funded by a conservative think tank, to take up half the discussion. Evolution? Here’s Dr. Jones-Smith IV, D.D., Esq., PhD;  clergyman/biologist from the Institute for Creation Science with his view. Go over to CNBC and you’ll see Larry Kudlow (one of the original Wise Fools of television) spouting bad investment advice, backed by often untrue ‘facts’. If you prefer Adderal to cocaine, Jim Cramer is ready for your non-skeptical embrace. Paul Ryan and Mitch Daniels have some very serious people convinced that the Path to Prosperity is paved with the bones of the poor, the sick, and the elderly. And so on, ad infinitum.

The ubiquitous panel format is transparent to most of us by now:

  1. Topic X is introduced by Moderator.
  2. Actual credentialed domain-level expert (call her DLE) is introduced.
  3. Very Serious Person (VSP) from “The Foundation/Institute/Society for Y” (generally with no formal training in topic X) is introduced
  4. Moderator introduces the controversy.
  5. DLE attempts to state fact-based opinion
  6. VSP does one of: (1) Deny the basic facts; (2) Throws out false ‘facts’ of their own; or (3) Accuses DLE of having some shadowy liberal agenda against Everything Good and True
  7. Moderator (guided by a mix of unavoidable personal bias and unsubtle economic and professional tensions) falsely equivocates, fails to correct any falsehoods or (despite their title), to moderate much of anything.
  8. Go to Commercial.

Repeat this exercise for 30+ years, and your end state is a culture in which any fool with an opinion, no matter how unscientific, unsound or just plain wrong, feels entitled to ignore or accuse anyone who disagrees with them. Regardless of any evidence or arguments presented against them, in any form or format. It is now nearly impossible for the non-expert (ie most of us) to discern what is true or not-true on any given topic. Which means that we’ve become unanchored from the Real. We now lack even the common terms to discuss what the Real might even be.

Consensus Reality, it turns out, requires a minimum of consensus.  Whatever ‘consensus’ is supposed to mean.

Chris Mooney’s new thesis (and book) diagnoses our problem perfectly, IMO:

Their willingness to deny what’s true may seem especially outrageous when it infects scientific topics like evolution or climate change. But the same thing happens with economics, with American history, and with any other factual matter where there’s something ideological—in other words, something emotional and personal—at stake.

As soon as that occurs, today’s conservatives have their own “truth,” their own experts to spout it, and their own communication channels—newspapers, cable networks, talk radio shows, blogs, encyclopedias, think tanks, even universities—to broad- and narrowcast it.

This state of affairs has been formally studied, and (contrary to what I would have thought had you asked me just a few months ago), this ignorance does not correlate with education. There are plenty of educated conservatives, with highly advanced degrees, who have consciously chosen to ignore formalized science.  They’ve chosen to Fight the Enlightenment.

Chris Mooney again:

The cost of this assault on reality is dramatic. Many of these falsehoods affect lives and have had—or will have—world-changing consequences. And more dangerous than any of them is the utter erosion of a shared sense of what’s true—which they both generate, and perpetuate.

You can’t decide how to govern or how to vote without at least some understanding of the facts, of what your true interests and goals are, or without an honest look at the real-world risks, benefits and consequences thereof. Granted, facts can be squishy and elusive things– but up until now at least, no one seriously proposed that there was no such thing as an outside objective truth.

I want to understand how we got here.

Assuming that they let us…

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With work and seasonal issues, I haven’t had much time to comment on much of anything, here or elsewhere. I do think I’ve finally become over-saturated with politics. The frenzied pace at which the GOP leaps from outrage to outrage makes it impossible to really think about any of it. Which is (quite probably) the intent. A significant wing of the Republican party is now openly against contraception; the rights of employees to their own lives and lifestyle on off-work hours; Panicking as the economy makes a better effort to crawl out of the ditch than most anyone thought it could. Rush losing advertisers in the first ‘media shaming’ of him that I can remember.

In other words– there is, indeed, a ‘wall’ that can’t be pushed against anymore. The Overton window might turn out to have a rightward stop, after all. Oddly enough, I consider this to be a good sign… but also surprising. None of these antics or statements are new. I’ve heard politicians say the same things out loud not too long ago. I’ve seen Bills written, and some even passed, there were just as bad or worse. And any newspaper’s Comments Section would have opinions just as fringe, or worse. So… what’s different? Why now?

Hunter S Thompson’s old line about the Wave that finally broke and rolled back keeps coming back to me. All this public craziness could just be their particular Wave, finally breaking on the shore after a 40-year run.

And those of us not involved can really only stand back and watch it happen, and try not to get dragged out to sea by the riptide.

Party Like It’s 1699.

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I still haven’t been moved to comment any further on the GOP primaries: There is no shortage of people doing that. The choice is down to the 1890s Plutocrat, the 1950s Bircher, or one of two 1930s-style Catholic Fascists. Voter turnout for the primaries and caucuses has been low, but the enthusiasm of the GOP tribe (at least as presented –say ‘amplified’– by the MSM) still seems strong. They are very furious about something or other, and they seem very sure that some nebulous somebody, some Other not like Them, must be made to suffer the fruits of their fury.

I’ve been over this before: They will choose whomever it is they decide to choose, and we’ll just have to go from there. GOP soul-searching is not really my concern.

That said, I’m still very puzzled as to why the right wing would decide to die upon the hill of… contraception!? The Susan Komen/Planned Parenthood controversy (ostensibly about abortion counseling services such as referrals) has come and gone, with the Komen foundation now quite probably suffering permanent PR damage from it.

Rather than tone down the rhetoric, the Catholic Bishops (with backup provided by the usual suspects) decided to complain about a new rule compelling their health insurance policies to provide contraception, free of co-pay, to their employees. The Obama administration then offers a subtle but clever compromise that passes the onus from the Catholic charities to the insurance companies themselves, which I suspect was their actual goal all along– but no, that isn’t enough. The Bishops now openly claim the right to control the reproductive lives of their employees. I’ll emphasize this: Not just of their parishioners, but of their employees, be they Catholic or not. And the GOP Congress seems more than happy to not only push this issue for them, but to extend this “right” to all employers.

Poll data shows that actual real-world Catholics are reasonably happy with the compromise. The Catholic organization that actually administers the Catholic hospitals is happy with the compromise. Even the insurance companies are happy with the compromise (presumably because providing birth control is, in the actuarial sense, cheaper for them in the long term). Polls claim that 98% of American Catholics have used birth control at some point in their lives.

So… why? Some observers see this as a stealth way to use the First Amendment as a lever with which to subvert the ACA. Once you get a religious exemption, it becomes easier to pull the new law apart piece by piece (so goes the thinking). Though how far does that go? If my employer is a Jehovah’s Witness, can he refuse to pay for insurance that covers blood transfusions? If he’s a Christian Scientist, can he refuse to pay for any health insurance at all?

Slippery slopes and all that– I don’t think the GOP ever really thinks that far ahead. Their instincts smell a loss of power, and their rhetoric then bends to come up with the excuses necessary to support and justify their instincts. But I just don’t see contraception being a winning issue for them. And, even in the current anti-union/anti-worker/deification-of-employers media climate, I just don’t see most Americans as willing to submit their reproductive lives to their employers.

But, what do I know? I’m just a dirty little atheist.

That’s Just It, We Are the Grownups…

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Stopped posting through the holidays… I’m thinking this is probably because I never intended this to be a ‘Political Blog’, there’s enough of those for people to read if they want to, and I already have some election fatigue, myself. But politics is what I’m used to writing about, after all those years of USENET and commenting on various forums & blogs. And politics is the only thing I’ve been thinking about enough to want to write about that I can write about. So I didn’t bother to write at all. Holidays, vacation, then back to work.

That said, back to the GOP!

The GOP nomination continues to look like a wave function that just won’t collapse. Santorum/Romney in an essential tie (offered by most observers as Romney Doing Well). NH with the expected Romney victory (but under 40%, still offered as Romney Doing Well). Ron Paul gets enough to keep going… it’s ‘for the kids’. Or, more precisely, his kid– adding more weight to the old truism that many (if not most) Libertarians are closet Royalists. Santorum decides to go all-in with extra Jesus to try for SC and (somehow) FL. A mean, wounded Gingrich with $5.2 million dollars in his pockets behaves exactly as one would expect a mean, wounded Gingrich with $5.2 million dollars in his pockets to behave: Accuse Mitt Romney of being an Evil Capitalist(tm). Perry goes “Yeah! Me too!”.

Meanwhile, a Democratic White House asks Congress for a free hand in making some structural changes to some Cabinet posts like Commerce and the Small Business Administration. Which the GOP House (9% popularity) is almost guaranteed to obstruct, because ‘shrinking government’ is their brand, not his. And because they can. In an election year.

They are, of course, expected to keep the House, and possibly even take the Senate. We’re also told that they have a 50% shot at the White House for the trifecta, with a bonus prize of possibly as many as three ultra-conserative Supreme Court Justices (none over 50 years old) by 2014.

For now, for me, this is just something to watch from afar, if only to see how it turns out. I still keep wondering if and when the proverbial ‘grownups’ will start to get involved– they should have, by now.

I wonder what they did with them.

“But wait, I thought you people wanted an asshole…”

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Barely two weeks in the limelight, and Gingrich starts announcing how much he’d like to dispatch US Marshals to arrest “Activist” (i.e. too-liberal) judges who make decisions he doesn’t like. Turns out that Newt’s peculiar techno-rebrand of 1930s Catholic Fascism isn’t going to have legs in Iowa, after all.

So now, our little circus leaves the 1930s, moving forward to 1964 with Ron Paul (who IMO is just a cunningly re-branded Bircher). Who needs the trappings of civilization, when you could have legal pot?

Iowa caucus in less than two weeks.