Let's Improvise Some Guitar!

Shall we improvise some guitar?

The bass player is playing a low G; what shall we play? We could play a D; that would leave the third undefined, and the listeners' minds would fill in the blanks with whatever they feel right now. Or we could play an F; down low or up high it would create a tension, suggest moving to a comfortable C along a bluesy highway.

We could play a B flat, take it minor, make it a little sad. Or a B natural, move it to a positive feeling, if that's called for. Or an A; the tempered A is a little out of tune to the natural A, but it's still clear enough to suggest harmonic movement. Or an A flat, which would create an almost unbearable tension, and suggest an incompetent punk or a masochistic free jazzer.

But let's keep it simple, and also play a G. Reinforce the bass note, up an octave or two. The note becomes more powerful; perhaps we're rocking out a bit. We could play the open G string: the lowest of the unwound strings, it has the most complex audible harmonics, and might suggest a folky flavor. It sounds almost comical compared to the other open strings. Or we could play the G on the fifth fret on the D string: it's wound, and has a very different sound than the open string, darker, blending better. Or even the G on the A string at the 10th fret; towards the middle of the string, it is full of odd harmonics, and emphatically more bassy, taking us towards a jazzy feel. Or we couFOR GODS SAKE SOMEONE HAND ME A COWBELL!

Don't Bother

I'll bet you don't care about my chronic ambivalence.

Rush versus Women

I've been seeing a lot of right wing chatter comparing Rush Limbaugh's attack on Sandra Fluke to, for example, Bill Maher calling Sarah Palin a "twat".

No, it's not the same thing at all.  You can't take Maher's statement and infer that Maher thinks all women are "twats".  But Rush wasn't talking about Sandra Fluke, really; he was talking about all women who use contraception.  He was calling all of them "sluts".  He doesn't understand how contraception works, and in his opinion, if those women would just keep their legs closed, they wouldn't need someone else's money for their contraception.  It's one of the most heinous anti-woman statements I've ever heard in public media.

Libertarianism, Amen

The thing that bothers me most about Randites, and Libertarians in general, is that they state some things that really seem to be truths, about personal responsibility, the importance of creativity, that the government that governs best governs least, etc. And then they ruin it by making a religion out of it.

 To paraphrase Ambassador Spock in Star Trek VI, these things are the beginning of wisdom, not the end. The only thing that really differentiates us from other animals is a feeling of responsibility for the greater good; if we don't have that, we are monkeys, at best.

 (Actually, the thing that bothers me most about Ayn Rand is that she was a sociopath. A charismatic one, sure, but still just a human being damaged by her upbringing. Instead of trying to fix herself, she created a religion out of her damaged personality. Which is probably not that uncommon, really.)

The Beginning of My Atheism

(This is not an anti-religious rant. It's just what I consider a funny story). I clearly remember where my atheism started. I was about 8, and sitting in church with my mother (for some reason I was in the big people's church and not in Sunday school, as usual). I was thinking that I knew I couldn't always control my thoughts and that they would go places that weren't appropriate for church. And I knew that God knew everything and could do anything he wanted to, and so I was frightened; what if I thought something really bad that would make God mad? And it occurred to me, the ONE thought I must never think was (remember I was 8): "Poopy Jesus". And started thinking it over and over again. At which point I started looking around wildly wondering how many people knew the horrible thing I had just thought and whether lightning would come all the way down from the sky for me, or if it would start just below the ceiling and therefore not set fire to the church which was, after all, God's house.

The Silliness of the "Double Taxation" Argument

Economic conservatives like to argue that capital gains, that is, income from investments, shouldn't be taxed because it amounts to "double taxation", that is, the person with the investments worked to earn that money, and it was taxed when he received it. The argument is baloney. Let's say you've saved a chunk of money, say $100,000, and now have that money invested in an interest-bearing account (this analogy also works for investments in stocks, etc). You are, indeed, taxed again, but only on any PROFITS that you have made from that investment. In other words, you are not taxed again on that initial $100,000, and in fact if you don't make any more money from it you won't be taxed on it. You are only taxed on any PROFITS you make off of the investment; this is self-evidently money that you have never had before; it is NEW money to you. So it makes no sense at all to say that you are being doubly-taxed on income from investments.

Me and Steve Jobs

No, I never met the man, but like so many of us he changed my life, several times in fact.

I've always been an Apple user (with a timeout in the mid-80s when the Mac became the Mac II and I couldn't come close to affording it, going with a Commodore Amiga instead).

True stories: 1) in the very late 70s I heard and fell in love with the Fairlight sampling synthesizer, as used on records (records!) by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. But I couldn't afford a $30,000 Australian computer/keyboard. The closest I could get was a keyboard/computer card combo for the Apple II called the Alpha Syntauri. It was a strange and clumsy system, and it didn't sound that good (it was 8-bit and sample length was limited to about 1 second), but it taught me so much about computers and sound. In fact, it forced me to learn about both in the GEEKIEST WAY POSSIBLE, and had me doing things like walking around making recordings of strange noises and then isolating single waveforms from a short samples, or building sounds additively by combining sine or more complex waves. And most of the time I'd just get something that sounded like a short in my audio cable. Fourier transforms anyone? Perhaps you'd like to play with a light-pen?

But ... having this machine allowed me to get my very first full time paying job in music, when I was hired to play keyboards(!) in Michigan's premier 60s cover band (my boss, Steve King, being almost as tech-obsessed as I was). And that job gave me the experience and $$ to record my first album. The rest is history (however obscure, it still happened in the past).

2) In the late 80s I realized I needed my nights free to work on and perform my own music, so I quit my cover band and pursued the profession of my fathers, that is, being a lawyer. But I thought I'd try such a seemingly-boring profession out before committing, so I got a paralegal certificate (this was when paralegals were a very new thing) and got a job as a legel secretary in a firm in Birmingham, Michigan. We were a group of legal secs that contracted work for various area lawyers. We used PCs running DOS; Windows 3.0 had just come out and I was very excited, I could actually fool programs like WordPerfect into running in a multitasking, graphical environment. But anyway ... I happened to impress one of the lawyers we did work for, and he was ramping up his Workers Comp practice and needed someone to work full time. So I went to work for Vern Leopold. Vern liked his computers (although he knew little about them) and decided to get the best, so he bought Macintoshes. He is still the only lawyer I've ever seen who maintained a Mac-based office. And those things were beautiful, elegant machines. I spent hours playing with the colors (up to 60K!) and writing form generation programs using Filemaker Pro. I finally realized that working with these wonderful machines was going to be my career, and since 1994 I've only done computer work.

So as you can see, without the work and integrity of Steve Jobs my life would have gone in a very different direction, at least twice. Tonight, I spent a couple of hours recording original music on my current Macbook Pro using the most elegant hardware and OS available, MacOSX, and now I'm writing this blog post on that machine.

Goodbye Steve. All my respect and admiration are yours, forever.

Hugh

Presidents and TV

I'm getting kinda tired of people complaining that Presidents have to be TV stars. Of course they have to be TV stars; every Presidential candidate must work well on the media of the day. Lincoln made good "stump" speeches; that's how candidates connected to the greatest number of people in his day. FDR, Truman and Eisenhower were all great on the radio.

Let's look backwards a bit at people's ability to talk on TV: Obama = great; GW Bush = not great (but better than Kerry or Gore); Clinton = very good; GHW Bush = better than Dukakis, not as nearly as good as Clinton; Reagan = great; Jimmy Carter = better than Ford ; Nixon = started out terrible on TV, hired experts and got MUCH BETTER. Are we seeing a pattern here? The ability to connect to people on TV is extremely important, and before the Democrats nominate another Kerry or Gore or Dukakis, they really need to keep this in mind.

It'll be interesting to see who can capitalize on Internet exposure in the future, although Obama does that quite well too.