Fear and Loathing and Another New Computer

The last time I bought a new computer was five years ago. For the next fifteen to eighteen months I did very little on it except fight with it, trying to get things to work, especially the audio hardware and programs. I did not draw or paint. I did not write new poems. I did not create new audio mayhem. I just butted my head against a machine (as a figure of speech, though smacking my fists on my desk was quite tangible).

It was a Vista 64-bit system. I say that and everyone nods knowingly. Goddamn Microsoft! Except the problems were never actually with the operating system. It was always the third party developers pretending it didn’t exist and refusing to deal with it.

For instance, Sony Creative Software‘s ACID Pro 6 was not operable on Vista, 32- or 64-bit, even though the OS had been on the market for over a year. After five months I was about to go in search of another music program when they released version 7 and solved the problem.…So, all the people who bought a new, top-of-the-line PC in that eighteen-month window could not use ACID Pro. I think the popularity of the program was already in decline but that would certainly contribute to it. (Their audio editor that I use, Sound Forge, gave me no problems.)

I think I ended up buying a new printer or scanner—I forget which—or both. And I upgraded from Adobe‘s CS1 to CS3, more out of preemptive fear than actual problems. In general the graphics side of the transfer was not that painful. Expensive but, considering that it all worked within a few months, it felt painless.

Knowing that my computer was in decline, a year ago I started replacing both hardware and software. I think I had hopes of finishing the process while Windows 7 was still the current operating system but since I’m no longer buying on credit it was a goal doomed to failure.…The Epson printer I had was not working that well anymore, so instead of buying more ink I spent an extra $40 or less and bought a new all-in-one. And I wanted to dump firewire so I’d have less to deal with on the new computer, even though the Focusrite Saffire audio interface I had seemed to be working—a false assumption, because as soon as I started using an M-Audio Fast Track Pro USB interface my computer no longer had problems booting up. That was a surprise.…The timing was perfect for me to subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud rather than upgrading to CS6, making a monthly payment rather than having to come up with $1200 for the upgrade.…I bought a new monitor but preparing for a new computer was just an excuse to get my fantasy screen space, all 27″ of it.

I’ll probably want a new backup drive because the one I have is smaller than the new hard drive, and to take advantage of USB 3.

I’ve just ordered Native Instruments‘ Komplete 9, which is compatible with Windows 8. Still, I expect the biggest headache will be when I try to install all the older product I’ve gotten from them. They have gorgeous sounding software instruments and when they are running smoothly are a pleasure to work with. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to bash them.…Part of the problem is that they want to guaranty that everything you install gives you that beautiful experience, so they don’t want you installing their old product. I understand that, but they have a tendency to discontinue wonderful sounding instruments that I want to keep using.…I was introduced to NI with a few ACID promotional instruments and then a close-out deal on Komplete 3, their multi-instrument software package, just as they were releasing version 4, a couple computers ago. Version 3 had something called Spektral Delay that combines delays and graphical, realtime, adjustable filters (that is, you can draw filter shapes as the sounds are playing) to process an audio signal (exceptional for creating ambient soundscapes and drones). The next version of Komplete I bought, 5, did not have it. I have managed to install it on new computers but NI hesitates to activate old programs because they can’t promise the software will work. This problem extended into a few other instruments as I upgraded versions of Komplete and changed computers. The real headache, though—very close to being a deal breaker in my continued relationship with the company—was the implementation of Kore 2 (software edition, they also packaged it with a hardware controller). It’s an instrument for layering and combining other instruments and effects to create something totally unique out of familiar tools. Fabulous idea. But it didn’t work very well and integrated poorly with their other instruments, even though half the marketing was promising it would. I jumped through so many hoops to get it to work.…Funny thing, even though their tech support kept trying to convince me that I was doing this or that wrong, everything began to function as intended in September 2009 when I upgraded to Komplete 7. They had finally adapted to Vista 64-bit.…It seems highly likely that those old synths and processors from Native Instruments—specifically Spektral Delay and Pro 53—will not even install on the new machine. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if Kore 2 works. I have not even come close to the depths of these or any of their other instruments.

Since ordering my new computer (an HP ENVY 010xt or something of the sort, with an Intel i7 processor and a second, non-bootable hard drive) I’ve been looking into Windows 8. I expect the worst.

Epson is pretty good about developing new drivers for their printers and scanners. From what I’ve been reading about Windows 8 it won’t matter: it seems they have legacy drivers for almost all common printers.

So, again, I’ll probably have no problems with the graphics side of the computer.

But what about my MIDI controller and audio interface? It looks like Avid has an up-to-date driver for the M-Audio Fast Track Pro interface (confusing—is it Avid or M-Audio?). When searching the M-Audio sight for drivers for the Oxygen 61 MIDI controller it looks like they are not keeping up. Does that mean I’ll have to get a new keyboard? While browsing the Sweetwater website it looked like very few keyboard controllers have Windows 8 drivers.

I don’t want to go through this again.

It’s bad enough all the days it’ll take to re-install software and transfer files. That I again have to fight with both hardware and software because third party vendors aren’t adapting to the new technology and market makes me want to give up. I’ve spent close to fifteen years digitizing my art and, really, my whole creative process, yet I want to give up.

Did I mention yet that Windows 8 has an all new user interface?

Perverted Psychedelia

I think every artist needs to understand what their work is about, to have it irrationally expounded, labeled, and pigeonholed. It offers a sense of completeness and purpose. That’s why we have critics and connoisseurs.

Finally, I have been blessed: Perverted Psychedelia.

Last night I was curious about my presence on the internet. I googled my given name, Michael Myshack, and found that I had something at books.google.com. Interesting. In 1984 I gave a test run to some of my poems and drawings by going to a quick print. It was awful, a total failure, complete with typos, poor copies of the drawings (I couldn’t afford halftone screens), paper that quickly decomposed from the acid in it, and bad binding. Earlier this year I resurrected the thing in digital form by scanning the printer spreads and compiling it in InDesign as an interactive PDF with navigation links and readings of all the poems that could be heard by clicking a button on each page. I posted a link to this on my other blog, Poetry and Other Sounds, to document my experiments with digital publishing.

I’m curious how it ended up on books.google.com. I wrote a review just to explain how to find a copy for download. But I also pointed out that it’s crap so don’t waste your time.

More interesting and a bit more fun was searching my online name, Swampmessiah.

I’ve made a few odd connections in the past couple years, having my recordings turn up in UK radio shows, whether podcasts or broadcasts, and Serbian DJ sets of a dark or death techno nature. That was flattering. And amusing, to think that no one in town knows my work but someone on the other side of the planet does.

But on something like the ninth page of links I found the cyrillic alphabet, with the roman alphabet spelling my name in the middle of it. I’ve been noted in Russia? Most of the international links had turned out to be duds—Spanish language sites offering free Mp3 recordings and ringtones by Swampmessiah, but nothing of mine was actually there.

This was a link to a site called bazurka.net and it was far from being a dud. (Put swampmessiah into the search window for a direct route. Also, a word of warning: almost all the art posted on this site is of a sexual or violent nature, or both. My work is sexually explicit and might not be to your taste.)

After a lot of scrolling, there were two of my drawings under a block of Russian commentary.

It took me awhile to figure out that there was a “translate” button at the top of the page (I’m exceptionally slow at finding these things). That’s when I was told the truth: Perverted Psychedelia.

I will quote the whole passage: “Perverted psychedelia. The author of works – swampmessiah. Psychedelic images, filled with members, tits, old age and despair. What else needs to be said that there is a modern psychedelic? Absolutely sick pictures. Although you may have a different opinion. So, psychedelic. Take a look:”

This was followed by two of my drawings. And if you clicked on a drawing it would open up a link to all the drawings I had posted on an art website, including a few still lifes, now appropriated by bazurka.net.

I think they were being complimentary.

I found the comments more incomprehensible than offensive. There seems to be an archaic value system thriving in Eastern Europe, very Christian at its roots with a Communist overlay, and now an archaic reaction by many who feel stifled by it. It’s like reading Baudelaire, the flaunting of traditional values and groveling in sin as a form of pleasurable self-loathing. In the West we’ve had Nietzsche, Tantric Buddhism, and the Counter Culture since then. Even though I was brought to church for a few years I really wasn’t raised in a Christian household. To me that morality and reaction game is very tiresome. But, then, so many people are raised in traditional households that “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” is still a mantra of liberation.

Perhaps even more incomprehensible is their obsession with psychedelia (it has its own section that you can find in the categories drop down menu). Almost all the art featured on the site is sexual or violent in nature, or combining the two. I don’t think they are intellectually capable of understanding any kind of art or philosophy that puts sex in a constructive or even quasi-mystical place. Likewise irrationality. American and Western European art have been exploring all these themes for well over a century. We’ve learned a lot about the psyche and how to use the subliminal, chaotic,  less conscious aspects of our minds for creative and constructive purposes. We’ve learned to interweave the conscious and subconscious as a way of life. I don’t think they really understand psychedelia the way we do. It was a fad for most of us and has become little more than a fashion statement. These guys incorporate Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Pop art and cheap juxtapositions of images into their labeling of psychedelia. I think I should say that they understand psychedelia the way only a few extremists did: as an escape from the drudgery of common sense. I think they’re putting a burden on the term that it cannot truly support.

Actually, I still have no idea what my art is about. I’ve been trying to understand it for decades. The assessment at bazurka.net was not informative. They are several steps, and centuries, behind me and elements within my culture in a process that is working its way from traditional morality and identity toward a more harmonious understanding of the human experience.

Beyond Good and Evil, Again

My disenchantment with morality began a long time ago, a combination of the counter cultural zeitgeist of my youth and my innate skepticism. Or maybe like most kids I didn’t like being told what I couldn’t do.

Part of it was the nonsense of sexual morality, the popularity of sexual liberation, and the onset of adolescence. In the days before AIDS it was kind of a no-brainer. (For the record, before you start thinking of me as a golden age swinger hopping from bed to bed, I was too shy to put much of anything into practice. A lot of my life is merely conceptual. The idea of being sexually restricted was enough to piss me off.)

Little by little it was also the pettiness of morality. Too often it was a matter of turning impropriety into sin, observing that people would be condemned to damnation for very trivial infractions. Thankfully I had a working class family of a generally secular bent with a more or less tolerant attitude, not because they were intellectuals (though most of my family are very intelligent) but because they recognized that we all make mistakes, that we all fall at one time or another, and that it’s only the chronic failures that you have to watch out for (but those failing individuals are still family and you don’t give up on family).

Also, that it was okay to do bad things to bad people (obviously missing that New Testament lesson of being pure enough to cast the first stone). The most memorable lesson was Little House on the Prairie, the television show, when Half Pint pushes Nellie down the stairs with a smug grin. It’s okay because we all know what a bitch Nellie is.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve been losing patience with dichotomies and the concept of purity. I like the Yin Yang thing where if you cut it in half you can never just have black or white, though I’d like to add a few more options.

Life is too complex and too subtle.

When I was about forty I was introduced to the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Generally there’s a conflict between people’s needs rather than a clash of good and evil; someone’s excess deprives those who are prudent; there’s a strange craving for power rather than respect for independence. Whatever the circumstance, the bad guys aren’t really bad and the good guys are not perfect. At worst it’s an issue of selfishness versus sacrifice for the common good. (I don’t mean to imply that Miyazaki or the Japanese lack morality. Only that those values are often much more complex and compassionate than those we’ve inherited from the Judeo/Christian/Islamic heritage.)

As I look into overcoming those inherited values I do not take the reactionary course of Nietzsche, in his way just as trapped as his Christian father, nor of the clichéd Satanist, turning everything Christian on its head. I just want to move on, dropping the whole thing like the rotting carcass it is. I want to be done with black and white, either/or reductions. I want to understand as much of the complexity of life as I can, and that requires a different way of looking at things.

Personally, I’d look to writers and the arts rather than to churches for lessons in life. It’s too easy to condemn from the pulpit. It’s too easy for the television evangelist to cover his corruption. It’s too easy to sway the masses, at least for a few minutes, into casting that first stone.

Birds Do Not Audition

I am not a morning person.

Yet there’s something almost tolerable about beginning the day with birdsong. It’s about 4 AM, the sky is becoming light but the sun’s not yet above the horizon, and the air—and my ears—are filled with birdsong.

And this would be truly tolerable, or even pleasurable, if the birds singing were all cardinals. Or even crows and bluejays. And it’s sweetness itself to hear a mourning dove (so, perhaps, I am a mourning person?).

Usually the first bird to squawk, that infamous early bird, is the American Robin. And my ears are in agony.

When I was young my mother would drop me off at church for my edification (though rarely sticking around herself, unless it was Christmas or Easter and the church was pretty) and I’d have to sit through the tedium of a rural Lutheran service. The pastor was rarely inspired. The congregation mumbled through everything. And the choir required no audition.

For the most part the choir was as lackluster as the rest of the congregation and you needed the book (a hymnal?) to understand the words. But there was always one person (in this case a woman) who had been told at some point in her life that she had a wonderful voice, apparently by someone tone deaf but easily impressed by volume, who would sing louder than the rest of the choir combined.

She was the robin of the service. Or the robin is the loud woman of the bird choir. In both cases, auditioning was not required.

Even if this isn’t proof of reincarnation it’s very strong evidence for parallel evolution, the same niche being filled by unrelated species.

I roll over onto my good ear and let the birdsong pass me by.

It’s a Different Moon, Down There

Waning crescent moon.

I used to read to my children at bedtime. It was one of the greatest pleasures in my life and one of my few regrets when it came to an end. (Not because they outgrew it but because I could no longer stay awake. I’d gotten a manual labor job in 2002, when my younger one was in first grade, installing office furniture. I’d read a few pages then start to babble, then begin to snore. At first it would amuse them. After a few months they lost patience and I lost one of the coolest jobs in the world.)

Too often we’d be reading a story and there’d be an illustration of the kid in the story being put to bed with an image of the moon framed in the window, and it was a waning quarter or crescent. Is nobody complaining about these irresponsible parents tucking in their child at about 4 AM?

You see, a moon that looks like the letter C is rising just before dawn. It’s waning: that is, it’s going to totally disappear from the night sky for a few days before it shows up again at sunset as a waxing crescent, where it more or less resembles the curve in the letter D.

I don’t have a very high regard for the natural world knowledge of designers, illustrators, and art directors. What they care about, and what they do really well—the focus of their skill—is to make it look good on the  page. They see many things that affect us but we are not conscious of. But it seems very few of them know any more about the natural world than the rest of us.

But then it struck me: what if the illustrator was Australian? Would the moon be the same down there? As much as I hated to do so, I had to cut the art department a little slack while I thought about this.

My spacial sense is pretty good but I could not wrap my mind around how a person would experience the moon in the southern hemisphere. Would the moon rise on the right or the left as you faced the equator? Would it be the same letter C just before dawn? Or would it be the curve of a D?

In the past couple of years I’ve made a few online acquaintances via soundcloud.com. If I were a more modern person I might have been able to google the question and, probably, have had it answered years ago. But, I’m old and slow witted and should be hanging under a tree by my fingertips collecting moss.…It turns out that no one in Australia pays any more attention to the phases of the moon than we do up here (everyone gives me a blank stare when I mention the subject). They couldn’t answer my question.

Since when have the phases of the moon become the sole provenance of science? Don’t you think poets and musicians should know these things? We only notice the full moon so we can howl at it?

A few days ago I discovered I’ve gained googling skills. Suddenly I feel thirty years younger, or maybe even forty years younger (fifty years is pushing the plausibility of literacy, though some almost six-year olds can read and write, and google).

One of the reasons I had trouble visualizing all this is how our maps are oriented. When we look at the arc of the sun or moon we’re facing the equator, and facing south. They rise on our left and set on our right. But in the southern hemisphere, when someone follows the arc of sun and moon by facing the equator they face north, just like they would when using a map: the orbs rise on the right and set on the left. I couldn’t flip the map in my mind.

So, to answer the question: that photo could be of a waxing crescent as seen from the southern hemisphere and the parents might even be putting the kid to bed a little too early.

A World without Pizza

Can you remember a time in which you did not know pizza? Can you imagine losing your taste for pizza?

I know the former and am encountering the latter.

I think it was in the second half of 1966, when I was nine, that I first smelled pizza. The odor was so vile I doubt I even tried it. This would have been the bouquet of parmesan from a Jen0’s or Chef Boyardee pizza kit. You’d get a box with a packet of dry ingredients for dough, a can of sauce and whatever flavoring (that is, meat or, maybe, mushrooms), and a packet of parmesan cheese. I did not know that there were restaurants that specialized in pizza. In fact, up until that evening I’d never heard of pizza.

The next time they made the novelty I tried it, overcoming the gag reflex caused by the malodorous cheese. I’m sure I was shamed into it. But I was hooked.

Perhaps this was one of my first gustatory adventures. My mouth remained conservative for many years to come, avoiding almost everything new and “strange”, until I tried vegetarian and ethnic foods when I was in my twenties. (Considering this was a boom time of new recipes for Jell-O salads and desserts, maybe not a bad thing.)

In Duluth we eventually had a Shakey’s and, then, Pizza Hut. I thought I was in heaven. (Long before the chains came we had Sammy’s. I would walk past the one in West Duluth almost every week for four years on my way to a band rehearsal (not that kind of band: when you took accordion lessons from Johnny’s Music you would be in a band, learning to play in an orchestral setting of kids with accordions, until you reached the supreme limit, the Duluth Accordionaires). Every week my mother would promise that we’d eat there, maybe next week. I finally tried their pizza about fifteen years later, on my own—not worth the wait.)

Over the years I’ve tried many pizzas in many cities. What I like most about them is that there are so many variations on the theme. You don’t really have to worry about how any particular pizza compares to your favorite: you just assume each will have its own character and enjoy it for the pizza it is. I find this difficult to do with any other food.

But now I’m losing my taste for pizza. There are so many reasons. My sinuses have always been clogged, limiting my sense of taste. Too often all I get from food is what hits my tongue: bitter, sour, sweet, salty. Or, worse, I have days when only certain odors cut through and what might normally be pleasant becomes offensive (back to that stinky cheese). But it also has to do with age and the deterioration of my body. Fats and acids now sometimes cause pain where they once gave pleasure—in my stomach. Regarding grease, it’s the combination of grease and acid together (for instance, French fries remain perversely satisfying), turning chili, pizza, marinaras, and my beloved berbere against me.

Of all my oddnesses and eccentricities, I can’t think of many things that put me further outside the mainstream of humanity and civilization than an aversion to pizza.