Quick Acknowledgement of a Cooverthon

For the past six weeks or so I have been engaged in a Cooverthon...that is, I've been re-reading all of Robert Coover's books* in chronological order in an attempt to get a sense of his development and his themes.

Doing this same thing with John Barth a few years ago pretty much destroyed my enjoyment of his work, so I'm aware that this is a dangerous and stupid thing to repeat with another of my favourite authors. One reason I'm doing this is to prove to myself that I didn't sell John Barth short; that other authors CAN stand up to such a rigorous and exhausting re-reading without becoming repetitive.

In some ways, Coover has an edge on Barth because his fiction is so unabashedly repetitive to begin with. My impression after years of fandom has been that -- following "The Public Burning" -- Coover used the same structure over and over again in all subsequent books: a protagonist is stuck inside a nightmarish (and usually genre-specific) environment from which he cannot escape, and as the book progresses the environment becomes increasingly horrifying.

That assumption was incorrect. Coover has been dabbling with that "nightmare" structure since his 1969 collection "Pricksongs & Descants," and while the structure DOES become a regular background feature of most of his subsequent novels, those novels ALSO contain many other novel elements: distinctive characters, bizarre authorial quirks, new types of focus.

We'll see if that impression continues to hold as I make my way through "Pinocchio in Venice" (1991) for the third time. Halfway through "Gerald's Party" (1986) my enthusiasm flagged a bit -- particularly discouraging because it has always been and still remains my favourite Coover novel by far -- but that's to be expected: most of Coovers books are INTENDED to exhaust you ("Gerald's Party" more than most).

I wish I'd rigorously blogged the earlier novels while I was reading them (and I wish I could guarantee that I'll continue to blog them as they come), but here are some scattered impressions:

• Coover has dabbled occasionally with theatre, but his plays are underwhelming. Having just read "A Theological Position" (1972) for the first time, my belief that Coover is not a great playwright is further reinforced.
• The real joy of "The Public Burning" (1977) is Coover's characterization of Richard Nixon: insecure, self-centered, nervous, awkwardly outgoing. Much of the book is just Richard Nixon endlessly pontificating in his head, and this is some of Coover's best writing. He's masterful at distinctive and consistent characterization (see "Gerald's Party" for the extremes of this), and it's easy to lose sight of that with all the experimental flim-flammery going on.
• On the other side of this, however, is "Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears" (1987), whose Jewish socialist sculptor is Coover's biggest failure: he never comes to life.
• "You Must Remember This" (the concluding short story in his "A Night at the Movies" collection) is, I think, his crown jewel. Although "The Babysitter" and "The Magic Poker" tend to be his most anthologized stories (probably because they're early works and -- more importantly -- do not have extended scenes of outrageously graphic sex), "You Must Remember This" sums up everything Coover does well. A close second is "Charlie in the House of Rue," also in the same collection. If you only read one Coover short story, pick one of those.

And now, a list of common Robert Coover themes.

• Women with big hips and butts. This obsession tends to taper off eventually, but it begins right there in 1966 with the introduction of the wonderful nurse "Happy Bottom."
• Cartoon/vaudeville mime routines. This again is more a feature of his early work, and again begins with "Happy Bottom."
• Bawdy songs.
• Vicious, fickle audiences.
• The protagonist is trapped inside an environment which he cannot escape, and the environment degrades over time. The landscape is usually disconnected -- doors never lead to predictable places -- and often chronology is confused as well.
• As a continuation of the nightmare environment, the protagonist usually suffers most when he is feeling proud or confident.
• In addition, the protagonist is constantly being punished for failing to follow rules, through no conscious fault of his own.
• Sometimes the environment and protagonist are part of an obvious genre.
• A large cast of couples who screw around with each other.
• Scatology. People tend to poop their pants.
• Puns.
• Extremely dense, impenetrable, high-brow concepts introduced in tiny snippets within the most banal of events, with the result that the concepts themselves seem banal. This starts happening during Coover's middle period.
• Sex with strangers.

* ...with the exception of independently-published pieces, which are difficult and expensive to find.

Hack Your Dunjonquest

My "map the Dunjonquest games" project was going fine until I hit level 8 of Hellfire Warrior. Not only does it feature some tricky "room connection" puzzles in the middle of the Great Plain, but it does not provide you with any room numbers. Even though I knew I'd still be able to solve the puzzle, it reduced my chances of ever being even remotely certain that the whole level was mapped. What would be the point of a half-assed job?

Well yeah, there'd be a point, but it would still be discouraging. So tonight I dove back into the Hellfire Warrior code -- which is very similar to the Temple of Apshai code -- and made a few changes.

Here are the things I've learned by poking around (literally). Some of them are generalizations based on Hellfire and Apshai that I haven't fully checked, so take them with a grain of salt.

The Files

"Temple of Apshai" contains the following files:

TEMPLE.PRG - The Innkeeper program
TEMPLE.DUN - The Dunjonmaster program
TEMPLE.PT1 to .PT7 - Files .PT3 to .PT6 are the data for levels 1-4, but the other .PT files are a mystery to me: character set data? Treasures? Traps? I haven't looked closely.

"Hellfire Warrior" is a bit more complicated, but the main files are:

INN - The Innkeeper program
DM - The Dunjonmaster program
HELLFIRE.5 to .8 - Levels 5 to 8.

There also appear to be different character sets for each level, and perhaps colour data for each level (since the levels ARE different colours).

The Code

The Innkeeper and Dunjonmaster programs are written in ATARI BASIC, with a few machine language routines that I think are for loading the custom character set and drawing the dungeon.

Here are some important things to remember when looking through the code.

• It's atrocious. Just sayin'.
  
• Variables that start with the letter U are really constants that represent numbers...U1 represents the number one, U10 represents ten, etc. This was a common way to conserve program memory, because the ATARI BASIC interpreter tokenized variables but treated every number as a separate piece of memory.
• The code is full of PEEKs and POKEs, because all character and level data is stored directly to memory addresses, not usually -- as you'd expect -- in variables. This allows the data to persist when the Innkeeper switches to the Dunjonmaster and vice-versa, but it's extremely difficult to untangle.
• Variable KA represents the memory address where the level data begins, and KB represents the address where the character data begins. In "Apshai," KA is page 103 (103*256) and KB is KA+2251.
• Much character data is also mirrored in variables, and the program swaps between the variables and memory occasionally, which might explain some wacky behaviour.
• Each level contains sixty (Q) rooms, but not all levels utilize every room. Judging by the file sizes (identical) I assume that the unused rooms are just full of padding.

Important Variables

• L: Character level (see below).
• O$: A string of all the commands that can be entered.
• MSTR: The line number for monster routines (7000).
• KF: The direction the character is facing (1 = up, 2 = right, 3 = down, 4 = left, I think).
• YA: The character's vertical position.
• XA: The character's horizontal position.
• TA: Fatigue.
• WC: Weight carried.
• PC: Wounds.
• PH: Maximum wounds.

Experience Points

One of the more mysterious aspects of both "Temple of Apshai" and "Hellfire Warrior" is how experience points are evaluated. You are told the number of points you have, and the "Book of Lore" says that you will benefit from a greater number of points, but it's difficult to figure out HOW.

Here's some insight. The programs DO check your "level" during combat, and characters with a higher level definitely get an edge in the calculations. Some stats also go up when you return to the Innkeeper with a higher level than you previous had (in a circuitous and bizarre chain of statements that I haven't bothered looking closely at).

How do you know when you've gone up a level? That would be nice to find out, wouldn't it? For some odd reason the programs never tell you, but the number of experience points you need to have for each level is 1000 times the square of the level number. So:

Level 1 = 2000
Level 2 = 4000
Level 3 = 9000
...
Level 20 = 400,000 etc.

The highest number of experience points you can get is 16,000,000.

Note that certain things in the game (like potions) can silently raise your stats, which might APPEAR to be a level bonus but isn't really. Also, "Hellfire Warrior" (at least the ATARI version) seems to have a bug where the Innkeeper gives you different numbers for your stats when you arrive from the ones you see when you return to the dungeon, and this discrepancy persists, as though the arrival stats are unmodified and the exit stats are modified by bonuses. Weird.

Important Line Numbers

• 5000: Parses input at each turn.
• 5100: Movement.
• 5300 and higher: Other actions.
• 7000: Monster stuff.

Unfortunately, many other routines -- various drawing and sound stuff, for instance -- is tucked away wherever it would fit. Lots of it is in the first hundred lines and is GOSUB'd to frequently. Presumably it's there because the earliest lines run fastest in ATARI BASIC.

Hacking the Program

It's easy enough to stop the program during operation (just press BREAK). To get back to the normal character set:

GRAPHICS 0

To reposition the coloured vertical bars (the remainder of the P/M graphics which represent you and a monster):

POKE 53248,0
POKE 53249,0

After you've made your changes, continue the program nicely with:

GOTO 5020

Make Mapping Easier

Here are some changes you can make to the "Hellfire Warrior" Dunjonmaster program to make mapping easier.

To force it to always print room numbers (which it skips for all levels numbered 6 and 8):

65 POSITION LS,U4:? "ROOM NO.:";

To always reveal a secret door when you (E)xamine a wall:

5701 IF PEEK(K+NT)=U3 THEN POKE K+NT,U2:RF(KF-U1)=U1:GOTO 5710

To always reveal traps when you (S)earch:

6300 IF PEEK(NP+KR)>U0 THEN GOSUB 670:GOSUB 679:GOTO MSTR

The last two might work in "Temple of Apshai" as well.

"Pearl" by Alysha Brillinger

I had a great time on Thursday night, helping to film the video for Alysha Brillinger's song "Pearl."



You'll be hearing a lot more about Alysha soon (if the Universal Music Group has anything to say about it), and hopefully the final version of this song will be one of the things you'll hear. Good luck, Alysha! May all your producers be productive. And may your next video have a budget higher than $0.00.

Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai

I have so many guilty pleasures that I'm in a permanent state of mortification, and one of my pleasures is a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl. It's not because I love killing monsters and collecting treasures; the actual BULK of a dungeon crawl game is incidental to me. What I REALLY like to do is to EXPLORE.

I've always gotten a thrill out of mazes, tunnels, and imaginary digital worlds. Unfortunately there are few games that are simply about exploring...pissy monsters are always attacking you and you have to solve anachronous "eight queens" puzzles at every second step. I'm of the opinion that the world (the real one) is waiting for a computer simulation of a rich landscape that doesn't necessarily have anybody else in it. The fact that I'd enjoy such a thing is creepy, really.

But anyway, my favourite games as a teenager were the ones where you could wander around a maze and map it, and then stare for hours at the map wondering what sort of cool place it would be to live in. Unfortunately back then I had a very low threshold for frustration, so I rarely succeeded in finishing the games that were so fun to explore: Ultima, The Eidolon, Alternate Reality, and...

...the Dunjonquest series, considered to be the first dungeon crawls for the 8-bit home computers. Originally developed by Jon Freeman (who is most idolized these days as being one of the creators of Archon) for his fledgling Automated Simulations company (likewise most idolized for later becoming Epyx), these games were all about wandering around mazes, killing monsters, raising your stats, collecting treasures, and running from Antmen who apparently used a vanilla-scented body lotion.

The Dunjonquest game that most people remember is "Temple of Apshai" and its two sequels, "Upper Reaches of Apshai" and "Curse of Ra." These three games -- like the "Hellfire Warrior" trilogy that followed them -- presented you with a very basic depiction of your surroundings, requiring you to actually read the room descriptions from the accompanying manual (or "Book of Lore.")

Originally written in BASIC in 1979, the first games required a great deal of patience and imagination, and the subsequent games -- with the exception of "Gateway to Apshai," a very different arcade-style adventure -- used the same engine. Even when the Apshai games were eventually released as a re-written, integrated, machine-language "Temple of Apshai Trilogy" -- the way most people remember them -- you still needed to shuffle your little character along featureless corridors, bumping into walls and slaying barely-animated 4-colour monsters.

So Dunjonquest games don't have a lot of appeal to gamers these days, and they've slowly faded away from the eyes of even the most nostalgic 8-bit fans.

Until now!

I'm happy to say I'm not alone in my love of these games, and I've been collaborating with Robinson Mason -- and scrounging the darkest corners of the internet -- to reclaim the programs. And not just the programs, but also the even more rare "Books of Lore" which are both essential for play and a delight to read.

While my compatriot tirelessly unearths more of the games and materials, I've been concentrating on reverse-engineering the BASIC code and mapping all the levels. I've discovered some interesting things buried in the convoluted rats-nest of oddly-ported BASIC, but that will come later. Right now, here are maps for the four levels of the first game, "Temple of Apshai."

I decided not to include room numbers, traps, or treasures -- that would not only clutter up my tiny drawings but would also spoil more of the game. And I make no claims to the 100% accuracy of these maps; they are complete and fully-connected, but their proportions may be slightly off. Click on an image to see a larger version.

Temple of Apshai - Level One


Temple of Apshai - Level Two


Temple of Apshai - Level Three


Temple of Apshai - Level Four


The maps for the next game ("Upper Reaches of Apshai") are coming soon (along with playing tips), and I expect there'll be a resource site starting up eventually. Until then, spare a thought to all those digital worlds that are locked up in decaying floppy disks in attics and basements, and consider rescuing them for one last time.

The Voyage of HMCS Thumpy (Preview)

Some time ago I realized that even though social media networks provide a useful tool for spreading news around, very few people these days will actually click on an audio link. They'll click on an embedded YouTube clip, but hardly anybody bothers to listen to a linked audio file anymore.

Because I want people to listen to (and hopefully buy) my music, I decided to make videos for some of my songs. Unfortunately I suck at building sets and lighting them, and I don't have the money or organizational ability to make such things look good, and I prefer to do everything myself to avoid worries about compensation, vision, and shuffling everybody's timetables.

So I bought Anime Studio Pro 6.1. I figured I could make simple animations to illustrate my music, and for a starter I've been working on a new song called "The Voyage of HMCS Thumpy." Here's an early version of part two of the five-part project, made entirely with the cheaper "Debut" version of the product. Warning: turn down your speakers, it's loud.



One thing that I've learned is that I'm a more visually-creative person than I've given myself credit for. However terrible I was in my highschool art class, I have a pretty good sense of style and proportion once I've grasped my tools. You'll see that more when I've finished the full version.

Which brings me to another thing I've learned about animation: IT TAKES A LOT OF WORK. Having a sophisticated tool like Anime Studio is only a small part of what animation seems to be about: design decisions, subtle tricks, and endless tweaking of the smallest parts of your project. I thought this would be easy, and I was wrong; witness the extended blog silence. Every day and every night I'm working.

Regarding the tool itself, Anime Studio is brilliant. Its interface is annoying and it has some very frustrating bugs, but once you've mastered half of it your options are pretty much unlimited. The little video above barely scrapes the surface. Wait until you've animated a CHARACTER.

Ah yes, the third thing I've learned about animation is that there are certain tasks that everybody dreads, and the biggie is "The Walk Cycle." I've just implemented my first one and I think it's pretty damn good, but I still have a lot to learn.

Anyway, I hope you like the video, and maybe you'll choose to become an animation hobbyist. Maybe I will too. But just remember that even a mediocre result takes a lot of effort and creativity no matter how many spiffy tools you have.

"Seals in the Workforce"

Here's an excerpt from a documentary that Schnapps and I were in many years ago!



Behind the Scenes Featurette

I usually take a short nap before going out to a club, because I'm old. Sometimes I'll wake up early because my blood sugar is low, and the combination of pseudo dream-state and nutrient-starved brain is the usual inspiration for a Schnapps video.

On Saturday it was the "seal song" idea (including the complete lyrics, which I woke up with), and as I stumbled around eating raw sugar I came up with a few scenes in a potential Schnapps documentary.*

As usual, these things must be simple and easy to film. I shot everything that night except for the "They don't hire seals" thing, which I realized was necessary when I began editing the footage. You can tell I wasn't drunk when I shot that scene because the Schnapps voice is all wrong.

Anyway, a combination of voiceover and footage filmed in various rooms -- including an unexpected refrigerator hum in the kitchen -- meant that I had to apply all sorts of denoisers, noise gates, and selective EQ to everything. What's the best way to disguise imperfect audio? Other than music -- which seemed inappropriate for such a stark subject -- the best solution is to make the audio sound even MORE imperfect!

So I added a wonderful "crackle" loop courtesy of the Soundtrack Pro library, as well as intermittent "pops" (a click sample pitched downward) and an occasional rustling noise similar to a dirty audio track on a piece of old film, produced by gently rubbing a sock over a microphone.

As usual, I'm amazed at the difference between raw footage and finished material. Each clip viewed in isolation is total crap -- leading to a lot of discouragement yesterday when I began pulling everything together -- but when I trimmed it and assembled it in the right order, it began to be funny...even WITHOUT the voiceover.

The lesson, as though you didn't know: editing is half the final product.

* This is not the first Schnapps documentary ever, but it's the first one that didn't turn out so bad that it was thrown away.

The Girls Want to Be With the Metaphorically-Antlered Girls, or, My Second Shy Date with Modern Dance

After last month's soul-searching experience with Dancemakers, I was curious about tonight's performance by Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers. I was especially curious when Brent Lott -- WCD's artistic director -- candidly stated that it wouldn't be the sort of program that people make fun of when they think of contemporary dance.

As much as I enjoyed the show, I beg to differ. Honestly, realistically, it WAS the sort of program that people (me?) make fun of. I'm thinking mainly of the piece called "In Silence," which had all the sorts of thrashing, reaching, rolling, hair-in-the-face, shouting, and Standard Drag Queen acting-out of old timey poetry (including fingers-down-cheeks for "tears" and pointing-at-audience for "thee," and I really mean "thee"). Plus more reaching.

I'm not mocking "In Silence." Okay, I admit it, I AM mocking "In Silence," because it reminded me of a version of The Go! Team without the fun. Watch this video and imagine that, instead of saying "We came here to rock the microphone," they're saying "In secret we met / in silence I grieve / that thy heart could forget / thy spirit deceive."



Before I tell you what I LOVED about the Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers, let me tell you one reason why I think modern dance sometimes comes across as more-pretentious-even-than-Lord-bloody-Byron. Perhaps through no fault of its own, contemporary dance seems (to me, in my limited experience) to be best suited to extreme emotions: unrequited love unto death, crushing agony unto death, the joy of REQUITED love unto joyous eventual off-stage death.

Maybe a primarily nonverbal, physical representation of a theme must forsake the lesser, everyday experiences and simply dive into the furthest swings of the emotional pendulum. Maybe choreographers and dancers find it more suitable to tackle "the agony of the claw-rent soul" than "the long day at work followed by an unsatisfying meal and the broken water heater...again."

This, perhaps, is where contemporary dance tends to leave me cold...I prefer more emotional subtlety to my experiences. When I start to read a Lord Byron poem, my eyes start at the top line and then suddenly hit the last line, without anything between making any sort of impression. I don't like a strong diet of extreme emotion.

Tonight's show was a pretty strong diet: pure love, pure lust, pure joy, pure anguish. Eyes by turns enraptured-wide and agony-squinted. The slow, burning glance over the shoulder. The yearning, the yearning, the yearning.

I loved the premiere of "First Walk to Available Sky," which I would subtitle "Sex-Bombs of the Pantomime Horse." I was even more in love with "Between the Sycamore," which exuded such a palpable energy and simple joy that it transcended everything: the space, the audience, the dancers...it was absolutely, beautifully superb.

All four dancers were in unbelievable sync, seemingly without need of any cues or external stimulus. Grace and strength, clearly-telegraphed emotion, flawless in every way. If there had been a "Music From Sex-Bombs of the Pantomime Horse and Other Pieces" for sale in the lobby, I would have bought it in a second: the music, particularly in the first half of the show, was striking and perfectly suited to the performances.

But oh, the yearning, the reaching! "Reaching-out-but-not-grasping" does seem to be a ubiquitous element of modern dance, one akin to the villain-with-the-black-moustache in silent pictures: perhaps an effective (even essential) storytelling technique, but everytime I see it I go "Oh, yearning, villain, black moustache."

Remember, I'm the endless rationalizer, the constant analyzer. Other people can lose themselves in moments that I simply cannot. Maybe this is why I'm such a cold fish in relationships, because when I need to express "yearning" I simply do not, for fear of committing a fiendish cliche.

Even so, I DID enjoy the performance. I'm sure that it's expected, in a repertory selection, that you'll sometimes say "Huh," sometimes say "Bah," and sometimes scream "LOVE!" I said all three things during the show and I say now unto the world: tonight I saw some of the most wonderful dance I've ever seen.

MY FAVOURITE ANECDOTE WHICH I CAN'T FIND ANY WAY TO WORK INTO THE COGENT PARTS OF THIS POST:

The fourth piece -- "Mouvement" -- featured dancer Kristin Haight doing a great deal of running and thrashing. At first the point escaped me, but gradually I formed the image of a Doberman Pinscher being euthanized at the vet's office. I am not being facetious, this was actually a very powerful impression of a creature in pain...but somehow a dog. Being put down. By a veterinarian.

When the piece was over and the lights came up I felt a little guilty, thinking surely that was not the impression that the choreographer wanted to make.

Then the woman in front of me turned to her friends and said "Did you hear about that dog, that wild dog, that was running around?"

"Ooooh," said her friends.

"They caught it and they TAZED it," said the woman with some satisfaction, and they all stared intently at each other.

My Shy Date With Modern Dance

On Thursday night I watched the rehearsal for "60 Dances in 60 Minutes," which will be performed at The Registry Theatre on November 4th. I'd hoped to learn what contemporary dance is all about and -- more importantly -- what makes it entertaining, enlightening, or (God forbid) insufferable to the modern layperson audience-member.

Can I explain the secrets of dance after a mere four hours of exposure? I only saw one single company performing one single piece and I didn't even get to see the end. There are many different approaches to dance, and every audience member is an individual, so I can't just say "This is what it's all about" (as much as that would save me some heavy pondering and how-do-I-express-this anxiety).

Seeing the rehearsal -- and enjoying some whispered chats with Jacob Zimmer, the dramaturge -- hasn't left me with many answers and it hasn't turned me into an instant fan. I learned a few more things about my personal hangups and how they relate to my entertainment choices...at the very least it was a good private therapy session.

But I'm not here to tell you about my childhood trauma; that's what the REST of this blog is about. I'm assuming instead that some of my insights may be interesting to you, whether you loathe modern dance or you think it's the absolute cat's meow.

WARMING UP

"60 Dances in 60 Minutes" was first performed in February by the five principle dancers of the Dancemakers company. For the show in Kitchener they'd chosen to add five local dancers to the performance, and they thought it would be interesting to have me -- the clueless, curious, neurotic-but-eloquent spectator -- sit in during one of their rehearsals.

I was nervous. As is always the case with events where audience-appreciation is not tied to long-standing rules of etiquette and judgment, my first concern was how much reverence I was expected to have for their work. How serious must I be? Dost I dare to make jokes about thee art, especially being the only person in the audience and surrounded by its performers and creators, all of whom are extremely fit? I can't speak for other shows, but I can say this for sure: if you don't laugh a bit during "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" then you probably have a really crappy sense of humour.

But the question remains: what should the audience get out of this particular performance? The more abstract a piece of entertainment is -- the more distant it is from convention, the fewer obvious cues transmitted by the performers, the more flexible its parameters -- the greater the potential for hostility, boredom, confusion, or feelings of boorish inadequacy. Nobody likes to feel stupid, especially not those of us who consider ourselves open-minded and experienced enough to be able to "get it."

Most forms of contemporary dance do not, in my experience, present themselves in traditional or unambiguous ways. If the audience doesn't "get" the performance, is that a failure of us or the dance company? Is that even a failure at all?

THE EXPERIMENT

The title "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" gives you an idea of what this performance is about, but here's a more explicit precis: the dancers, singly or in groups, will perform various tasks during a certain time period. How will ten dancers (and the audience) perceive the performance of these tasks in relation to the passage of time?

We have all benefited from (and been victimized by) time's subjectivity. Two hours spent at a good party can feel like ten fleeting minutes, while a ten-minute drive home with a full bladder simply never ends.

"60 Dances in 60 Minutes" is -- in its most obvious interpretation -- about the subjectivity of time. Even if you miss the somewhat hasty and informal explanation at the beginning of the performance, you will eventually notice that the dancers are attempting to synchronize their tasks -- like counting silently in their heads -- but they never finish together despite all their highly-polished dancerly-discipline.

Why can't they sync with each other? Because the passage of time, in the absence of coordinated cues like the a visible clock, is a subjective and ever-changing thing. None of us have quartz crystals in our heads. We rely on metabolism and breathing, stride-length and thought-passage to inform us of how quickly the rest of the world is moving in relation to us. When all the dancers close their eyes simultaneously and start counting silently, and then each of them raises a hand when they have reached the agreed-upon number, the dancer who ate a cheeseburger may finish faster than the one with a painful blister on her heel. This is a bizarre and entertaining way of expressing what we deal with every day: there is no way for people to synchronize with each other without external time cues.

To look at it in one way, "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" is a series of experiments to demonstrate how individual people perceive time. Sometimes the time intervals are short and sometimes they're excruciatingly long, and due to this occasional excruciating nature, the AUDIENCE is ALSO confronted with their individual time-perceptions: three minutes staring at a motionless line of dancers evokes all sorts of feelings, but one of them is how long three minutes can be when not a heck of a lot is going on.

THE AUDIENCE AND THE NARRATIVE.

Back to the rehearsal and my impressions of it. Early on I noticed that the director and the performers were using evocative words to describe the sixty different sections of the performance.

One section was called "witnessing," for example, and another was "the how-to's." There were movements called "abbreviations" and "acronyms," and there were also "koala" and "suicide."

These words were a convenient shorthand for the dancers, of course, but I was fascinated by the fact that the audience would never hear those words (unless they looked at the rundown which was provided at the end of the show). When I saw one dancer carrying another, belly-to-belly, in a tight and motionless embrace, my perception of the act changed as soon as I found out -- thanks to my privileged position as silent rehearsal voyeur -- that they referred to this action as "koala." If they'd called it "frog" or "Kali" then I probably would have viewed it differently.

Why do I bring this up? Because our perception of PLOT is just as subjective as our perception of TIME. "Hamlet" would give a very different impression to a 17th century barmaid, a bored highschool student, and a queer theorist respectively. No plot can contain one single, universal impression for everybody. You can say this about books or movies or any other type of public art you can think of.

Contemporary dance rarely telegraphs its narrative as clearly as a Hemmingway novel, and even if it DID there'd be the same issues of interpretation. When we see one woman suspending and holding another woman closely, what does that mean to us? Is it love? Is it trust? Is it fear or hope or disability? Hemmingway would tell us which it was -- and he'd probably wrestle both dancers to the ground as well -- but would we agree with his assertion? And would our perception of the act be richened -- or cheapened -- if we found it was called "koala?"

Contemporary dance, to me, seems largely ambiguous. The thematic clues given to the audience in "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" are not presented like they would be in an Agatha Christie novel...

...but the point of "60 Dances" is not to discover whodunnit before the pompous detective does. I suspect that the dance company would agree with me that they do not expect everybody in the audience to absorb the information provided in exactly the same way; in fact, the company might HATE that possibility. I suspect that they -- and perhaps most artists who work in relatively non-traditional ways -- want the audience members to make up their own minds.

But here's the thing: I'm not part of the dance company, I'm an audience member, so how many clues to the narrative should I be given? How much of it should be explained, and how clearly? Should there be identifiable characters in the performance with individual motivations, or are they all just "dancers," lab rats in a time experiment...a time experiment which I may not even understand is going on? While watching the rehearsal I found myself fixating on the words "koala" and "the how-to's" and "witnessing" because I CRAVED a plot. I clung to one reoccurring figure -- a girl in a parka with a subtly funny walk -- because she provided me with a sense of character that I find satisfying and fulfilling.

"What is the narrative of a symphony?" Jacob asked when we talked about this, and he's correct. And keep in mind that I was also watching the rehearsal of a performance that was yet to be completed, and watching it in the artificial environment of a closed theatre, without an audience, under bright lights, with a full bladder.

But I think this comes to the root of my general wariness about contemporary dance. I am not familiar with the concepts and history of the artform so I can't construct even a tenuous narrative like "I don't understand the literal soup cans but at least I understand pop art." I am also not privy to the thoughts of the dramaturge or the director or the performers, because they choose to remain silent or (more likely) because I hate reading the tiny print on theatre brochures.

Without knowing the concepts that the company is trying to express, I can't compare them with my own impressions. I don't know whether they've succeeded in getting their ideas across. And if my impression is the opposite of what they intended to convey, has the performance been a failure? Is there such a thing as failure in contemporary dance? Or in an abstract painting? In a symphony?

PS: I am generally confused by the symphonies as well. Sorry.

AESTHETICS VERSUS THEME

Back to the rehearsal. "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" is not just an experiment in subjective time; if it were then it would be best inflicted on a bunch of undergrads in a controlled manner (hopefully with electric shocks), and not performed on a stage.

No, the AESTHETICS of this performance are important as well. It's as though the success of the aforementioned experiment depends partly on whether the experimenter is wearing footwear which compliments the style of the electroencephalogram.

During the rehearsal there were constant negotiations between the artistic director, the associate director, and all ten dancers about the smallest details of the piece. This process was collaborative and everybody offered suggestions, and while some were practical -- dealing with safety, for instance -- and some related to theme, most of them were based on simple aesthetic considerations.

The discussions about the look and feel of the piece were the only extended and difficult ones I witnessed; should the dancers who perform the "knee burn" be hesitating before they slide, or should they dive right in? When two dancers do an impromptu translation from French to English, should they do it cautiously or should they just shout over each other? And how noisy should each of them be when they all count out loud?

A lot of discussion went into what one particular dancer should do during a three-minute segment. When somebody suggested that she should run to the back wall and press herself against it, associate director Bonnie Kim said "That's great. I love the wall." And everybody agreed.

"Loving the wall" has nothing to do with the theme of "60 Dances in 60 Minutes." There is no thematic reason why that dancer, at that time, should do that particular action. It's not a plot thing, it's not a character thing. It just seemed good.

In another one of our whispered conferences, Jacob agreeed that aesthetic decisions are pervasive and important to him, and they provide another aspect of what the audience may take away from the show: does it feel right? Is it well-paced? Is there enough variety?

Some modern works are composed entirely within rigid initial constraints, which is why they may come across as dry, pedantic, and mechanical. There must always be the consideration of how much one should deviate from (or add to) the central conceit in order to appeal to form and feeling, those most subjective of audience impressions. Does it look or sound good? Does it resonate nicely? Does it move so far from the theme that the point is lost and the audience is distracted?

Sometimes yes, if you're as literal-minded as I am. When the dancers jog or slide or tickle each other, a somewhat grumpy part of my brain wants to know "why are they sliding?" because I can't relate those things to my everyday life. When a stranger walks up to me on the street and spends three minutes explaining to me how to bake a Shepherd's pie, I think he's insane and he probably wants to put me IN the pie, which is not pleasing at all. It's kooky.

Jacob whispers to me about furnishing a room: there are basic rules regarding size and clearance, but there are also aesthetic considerations. It's not generally desirable to eliminate either consideration: you end up with a fully rule-based composition (like a boiler room) or one that looks great but your friends avoid, because the couch is too far away from the coffee table, and you can't see the TV properly, and when you touch the wall it collapses.

If modern dance doesn't appeal to the eye, has it failed? Conversely, if it ONLY appeals to the eye, is it nothing more than an awkward Hokey-Pokey that you're not allowed to join?

THE PERFORMANCE

Why all this speculation? Why didn't I ask Jacob or director Michael Trent what THEY felt the audience would perceive?

I'm not lazy, honest! I wanted to develop my own ideas about the piece, and I also wanted to glean -- non-verbally, instinctively -- what they subconsciously hoped for and expected. What would be a success for them? What would failure be? Did success or failure even matter?

The primary impression I got was that they enjoy what they do, they are intensely interested in their audience, and they are confident that people WILL appreciate and understand it. During the four hours I was there I didn't actually see them debate their methods of communicating their ideas, but those discussions probably happened long ago, during the initial planning stages, before the February shows ever happened.

And me? My original plan was to go to several rehearsals and try to see the process from different angles, but I don't think I would have learned anything more than I already did, and besides I'd need a lot more exposure in order to make this really be about THEM or YOU instead of ME.

All I REALLY know is that, despite all of my kvetching and analyzing and quizzing, I'm impressed with what they're doing and I can't wait to see the show. I'm sure I'll enjoy it. I won't know why, thank goodness. I think I just will.

But I'll have to take all other performances as they come, much as I would a book, or a film...or even a symphony.

60 Dances in 60 Minutes - The General Idea

This morning I was invited to attend rehearsals for the upcoming "60 Dances in 60 Minutes" show, which will be performed November 4th at The Registry Theatre. They didn't invite me because I'm a spectacular hoofer with hotcha feet, but because...

...well, just because. Let me explain.

I love to dance in a bar. I enjoy the "Thriller" dance just as much as the next person. I get a kick out of Ann Miller's tapping, and if I ever dust off my barely-worn tap shoes I just might decide to annoy my neighbours again.

But I don't understand "contemporary" dance. Watching a contemporary dance troupe, for me, is like watching sign language: I appreciate the craft and I understand that it has a history and a meaning and a complexity (and perhaps even a syntax), but I simply can't tell one movement from another. "Sun" might as well be "bathtub" for all I know, just as the movements of contemporary dance could be "Reaching for the tragic revelation hidden behind my lover's smile" or "Ouch, my arm!" at any given time.

I am certainly not the only person who doesn't "get" contemporary dance; lots of people find it baffling. And what's the best way to explain it to the uncomprehending majority?

Simple: send in a Mister EveryMuffy to have a look, somebody who is INTERESTED, and somebody who can EXPRESS confusion and revelation and perhaps even boredom in a widely-read (if I do say so) blog. It's even better if that EveryMuffy will do it just for the fun of it.

I know all too well that some ambitious plans don't work out. Maybe I'll find myself totally uninspired by the proceedings and unable to say anything that is interesting. Maybe, while poking around the Registry Theatre, I'll accidentally drop a sandbag on somebody -- please not artistic director Michael Trent -- and get kicked out for causing a ruckus.

But maybe not. If the stars align during the next week then you -- the curious dance outsider -- might read something of interest in this blog. And I might decide that even if I can't express complex emotions with my uncoordinated body, I might at LEAST learn how to finally do The Twist.

Back in the Objective-C Saddle Again

Every year or so I decide to tackle Objective-C and Cocoa again, partly because I want to create useless applications for my computer, but mainly as a brain-sharpening mental exercise.

A few things have hindered me:

* An incomplete mastery of C.

* Textbooks which tell you to do things, but don't explain why.

* Textbooks which go out of date with each OS X update.

For these reasons I've bumbled around the language, eventually finding myself out of my depth and retreating to safer pursuits (like YouTube puppet shows with a seal, for example).

This time I think I'm REALLY getting somewhere. Part of my success is due to my previous attempts at learning the concepts -- even when I failed I took away some valuable lessons -- but I'm using some different resources now...ones that suit my knowledge level AND my method of learning.

I started with Stephen G. Kochan's "Programming in Objective-C." Whereas most other books either assume a total knowledge of C or a complete LACK of knowledge, Kochan's book is written for those who understand the concepts but REALLY need a syntax refresher. The first half explains all the elements of C in an Objective-C context, and ends with "Underlying C Language Features" (like structs and character arrays) that you'll probably never need (but should know about anyway).

The second half of the book is devoted to using the essential Objective-C Foundation classes -- numbers, strings, files, etc. -- and all the important methods. Once you've finished "Programming in Objective-C" you are ready for the Cocoa concepts.

That's where Aaron Hillegass' celebrated "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" comes in. This book assumes a comfortable knowledge of both C and Objective-C, and it teaches you how to use them effectively with Interface Builder. By page 100 you're building full-featured applications for your Mac...

...but Hillegass' book is more of a "gentle introduction" than I prefer; it often skips over the lower level "HOW does this work?" stuff. If you're like me then you NEED that information, so I recommend that you SIMULTANEOUSLY read "Cocoa Design Patterns" by Erik M. Buck and Donald A. Yacktman. By teaching you the best ways to use the extremely flexible NEXTSTEP frameworks -- and revealing the common patterns that developers use when writing Cocoa applications -- you learn exactly why Hillegass tells you to -- for instance -- [[foo alloc] init].

The only downside of "Cocoa Design Patterns" is that it's still unfinished. I bought a "rough cut" advance copy and it is teaching me SO MUCH...but it's damn obnoxious to read, full of spelling mistakes, incorrect cross-references, incomprehensible formatting, and half-finished ideas. It's very much a work in progress -- and it's advertised as such, so I wasn't ripped off -- but you MIGHT want to wait until the book is actually released.

These three books are my recommended recipes for success. They teach you the syntax, the application, and the structure of Cocoa programming. They also teach you why creating Mac applications is such a pleasure...until you start doing reference counting, of course.

Phonebox/Lunchbox

Rather than exclusively filming mini-drag shows -- which are rife with copyright infringement -- or silly sketches -- which have a whole bunch of tiresome and restrictive requirements -- I decided to make a music video. But I wanted the video and the music to evolve TOGETHER, instead of filming footage for a song I've already done.

So I filmed some footage and moved it back and forth between iMovie and Logic Studio, massaging both the video and music until...

"Phonebox/Lunchbox," the first in a projected series of "box" video-songs.



The Background

This is all part of an attempt to broaden my horizons, and in particular to learn new skills. I figured that this project would require me to research and explore a lot of things outside of my comfort zone: concept, composition, and actually trying to ACHIEVE something instead of just letting it happen.

Remember when I got all gushy about the video stabilization feature in iMovie '09? Well it has a pretty serious bug: if you choose to stabilize your trimmed clips in the editor window (instead of stabilizing the pre-trimmed clips in the event window), and then you decide later on to change the trimming for the clips, iMovie tends to misapply the stabilization settings and it will not let you override them. Even deleting the video entirely from the project and then re-importing it will not help...iMovie never forgets.

So if you noticed the three or four jittery clips in that video, I'm afraid that there was nothing I could do: iMovie would not let me choose a stabilization value above 101%. I have learned my lesson.

Most of the phone and wire footage was filmed on a beautifully cloudy, ominous morning. The park footage was filmed that sunny afternoon. I'm totally aware that many of the things I filmed are NOT telephone-related, but heck, I'm no technician!

As for the telephone voices, I have been collecting those for years, and this project was in many ways born from a desire to finally USE some of them.

iMovie '09 Stabilizes Me

This "make a movie from scratch" thing is entirely new to me, but every project is a learning experience. I've learned a little bit about composition, and a bit about lighting, and a LOT about how to use iMovie for something it's not meant for.

iMovie is a video editing tool that is part of Apple's iLife, a suite of integrated multi-media products. You get iLife for free when you buy a Macintosh so a lot of people create their home video projects using iMovie. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than Apple's professional offering (Final Cut Pro).

But why should Apple bother to even SELL Final Cut Pro if people are happy to simply use iMovie? Well, Final Cut Pro is marketed to the professional video editor, and iMovie is marketed to hobbyists. And for that reason, before Apple releases a new version of iMovie, they usually go into it with a stick and beat everything useful out of it.

Even so, if you have a little bit of ingenuity (and an awful lot of patience) you can stretch iMovie beyond its limits and create -- say -- all the videos I've been putting online for the last two years.

This week, however, I ran up against something new: shaky video. In the past I have always filmed footage using a tripod, but now that I'm trying something radically different -- which you'll see soon if it works out halfway decent -- I actually had to take my teeny-tiny camera (a Canon PowerShot SD1000) outside and shoot things by hand...on a windy day.

Despite the wind, there's apparently a growing problem with cameras getting smaller and smaller: tiny, light cameras are hard to hold without shaking them. When I got my hard-filmed footage home and looked at it on my computer I absolutely freaked: it wobbled all over the place, rendering all my focus and detail into an incomprehensible stew!

Short of hiring a steadycam operator I had only one recourse: to upgrade to iMovie '09, which -- besides a whole whack of other new features -- allows you to stabilize shaky video. It analyzes your clip, tracks the motion, and then zooms in JUST ENOUGH to crop out the edges while moving in the opposite direction of the shake.

People are raving about this feature, and about iMovie '09 in general. The thing is, you can only buy iMovie '09 as an integrated iLife '09 package, and this costs (in Canada) $100.

That would be fine if I actually USED anything in iLife other than iMovie and iPhoto, or if there were an existing upgrade path from the relatively pathetic iMovie '08 (which is what I've been using for the past year)...but no. As the folks in our local Apple store said, "There's no upgrade path, but the suite is WAY cheaper than anything you'd get from another company."

Plus there is simply no other game in town. All the other video editors for the Mac are either crappy or vapourware.

So I bought iLife '09 yesterday and installed it late last night. It came to life instantly and worked perfectly. And when I instructed it to stabilize one of my shaky clips -- which it does at about half the speed of the clip itself -- it...holy wow, it WORKED! It looked PERFECT!

I've stabilized half the footage I shot yesterday and it has all come out clean: no shake, no weirdness, just a smoothly-flowing image. All my carefully-filmed details are visible again. iMovie '09 -- despite its slightly galling price -- did exactly what it promised to do.

How often can you say that about software these days? And I haven't even looked at all the OTHER features yet.

Apple, I quite often love ya.

Mini Drag Show: "A Drag Queen and Her Seal"

Last week I realized that I'd temporarily lost my grip on my own destiny. I felt no sense of purpose and didn't know what to do. After a few days of moping around and staring out the window, I settled in and created this: an epic video starring Schnapps the Seal.



I think it stands pretty well on its own, but here's the whole background, if you're interested.

What Came Before

Last month I was tapped by my company to help create a "demo reel" for one of our products. I was given a script to read, and in addition I was asked to create the music to accompany the demo. It was a challenge I threw myself into.

I figured this would be a good chance to explore Logic Studio's huge collection of Apple Loops, and I discovered that they ARE useful. It still takes a lot of skill to mix and match the loops, but that's only the beginning...if you really want the project to sound good you need to do extensive editing of the loops themselves.

The result was a darn fine demo reel, and a song called "Buy Our Sexy G-7." My company has complete ownership of the reel so I can't post the material independently, but once they post it online I'll provide a sneaky link to it.

"A Drag Queen and Her Seal"

I scribbled down some simple dialog last Thursday, with a few basic ideas but no actual storyboards. I've realized that I HATE doing storyboards. In addition I wanted this project to be totally free of copyright infringement...all me, including the music.

Friday night -- before heading out to Club Abstract -- I spent an hour recording all the footage. It was incredibly hectic. I realized how hard it is to say lines to an impersonal plate of cotton balls, especially when you're a piss-poor actor. I switched a few things around at the last minute. I forgot to record one punchline entirely. I got awfully tired of having a seal puppet on my arm.

Editing

Really, iMovie is not such a terrible (free) movie editor, if you're willing to work in an entirely linear way (with no overlaps). I felt restricted by the choice of titles and transitions, but it's not like the rest of the video was particularly spiffy. Most annoying was the terrible hiss picked up by my Cannon SD1000 "Power Shot" camera...it's apparently due to kamikaze electrons, but I just chalk it up to "cheap internal microphone."

During editing I realized how much I'd benefit from having a second person around during the filming. I pronounced Schnapps' name differently at the beginning and the end, and my "clever" substitution of a vodka bottle for a Moscow Pride weapon (as opposed to a flip-flop, the original choice), made it look like *I* had bludgeoned Schnapps in the preceding scene. Oh well, ambiguity and mysteries!

Denoising

The hiss on the audio was really terrible. Once I'd "picture-locked" the edit I exported the audio and played with it in Logic Studio, but none of the plug-ins made a noticeable difference.

Then I discovered a denoising tutorial for Soundtrack Pro -- a utility which comes with Logic Studio -- explaining how to take a "noise pattern" snippet from your audio and use it to cancel the noise in the rest of your clip. I'd never used Soundtrack Pro before -- and I can't see myself using it for anything but this, particularly because its shortcut keys are totally different from Logic -- but its noise cancellation thingy did a pretty good job. There's still some hiss in the video but it isn't quite so bad.

Music

So I exported the denoised audio from Soundtrack Pro and brought it into Logic Studio, along with the video clip, and I got to work on the music.

One problem with not having a professional video editing system -- or a bunch of people all working on the video together -- is that it's difficult to cue music to video AFTER it's been cut, especially when you're a non-musician working with a strict temp. Sometimes a video transition happens in the middle of a bar.

But that isn't really important, because I've realized -- both in this project and the demo reel project -- that soundtrack music is both subliminal and terribly important. You're not supposed to notice it -- though this "Schnapps" video is deliberately campy in that way -- but if it's not there then everything is flat and boring.

Anyway, about the loops and sound effects. Soundtrack Pro comes with two gigs of foley-type effects that I thought I'd never use...but just like the Apple loops, I've discovered how useful they are for quick and dirty (and low-expectation) projects. Want a crowd noise? Grab from the two dozen ones available on the DVD! They even have a collection of screams that are lots of fun and quite distinctive.

Since I was doing this video project for myself -- and was therefore unconcerned with an even remotely professional result -- I finally decided it was "good enough," even if it sounds a bit thin and unfinished (particularly near the end). Still, I think it worked out pretty well, and I'm amazed that an hour of filming and approximately ten hours of post-production have yielded a nifty little video.

Most important are the lessons I've learned. There's nothing like an enforced project to force you to learn your applications better. I'm ready for the NEXT video...but what will it be?

Touching Bass

It's time, I think, for an update!



First of all, there are some new pictures on Flickr, including the one above, which serves a few purposes: to prove that I really DO have a bass, to show off my New Year's Eve outfit (theme: "red"), and to show that my cat is either still alive or stuffed...the former is true.

As a person who has never seriously tried to learn an instrument -- let alone the theory behind playing one -- my experiences might be useful to those who want to try it themselves. I bought some self-instruction books (and a cheesy DVD starring this guy), I hooked up an amp, I tuned the strings, and then I got down to business.

In order to learn a skill I need to understand what I'm actually doing, but in this case I'm forced to realize that the background information is so specialized and esoteric that I'll need to take some of it on faith. I've learned a lot over the last few weeks -- in particular the very necessary information about WHY the strings are arranged and tuned the way they are -- but I still have a long way to go. It's humbling to learn the major scale and then turn the page and realize that it's only one of many, and that all those wonderful rules and tricks I'd assiduously practiced no longer apply.

Who can we blame for the bizarre grab-bag that is musical knowledge and perception? Lay it on the Organ of Corti.

I'm playing the examples, over and over again. As far as I can tell it's much easier to learn your scales on a fretted instrument (as opposed to one with keys) because you're just transposing your fingering up and down the neck. I'm working on the major chords and trying to keep in mind the notes I'm actually playing, to lay the groundwork necessary for actual competence (as opposed to rote repetition).

It's thrilling to me how, by just doing the same thing over and over again, you are eventually able to refine your abilities. For instance, now that I can actually play my scales without thinking about them, I can concentrate on keeping the other strings from ringing, and I can even stop staring at the frets for a short period of time.

If you want to learn the bass I DO recommend David Overthrow's book & DVD, but it's disappointing how many errors and omissions they contain. A beginner should NOT be presented with an illustration containing the wrong numbers, or be forced to puzzle out why a number isn't where you expect it to be. Otherwise it's just fun watching Overthrow playing dead-simple reggae basslines which obviously bore him to tears.

In summary: if I can maintain my enthusiasm and discipline I'll actually be able to play the bass by the spring. I won't be GOOD necessarily, but I think I'll be able to hold my own.

Otherwise life is good. I've come through the holidays relatively unchanged after my initial (and sort of inexplicable) emotional snap, with the addition that I find myself simply caring less about my own behaviour in hindsight...like, I think I've suddenly stopped worrying about such things. This could be because I've done something terrible to my shoulder -- it crackles in the morning -- and this leaves me less energy for feeling silly that I dropped the contents of my purse all over the dancefloor steps last night.

It's all a matter of perspective.

And to Syd & Gary, the removal of the blog "comment" feature started out as an accident but soon became deliberate, just because I needed to realign myself to the world, and this blog is part of that. I've turned them on again! Life is good.

Oh yes, back to the cat: she continues to be fragile and skinny, yet alert and spunky. She's had a slight rheumatic limp for about six months which has suddenly gotten a lot worse, but it hasn't stopped her from catching more mice and devouring them at my bedside, always leaving a piece behind: a black organ which looks like an olive, a veneer of pinkish blood, a tiny back foot with claws and pads attached.

Life in No-Time

I am not an efficient person if I don't have some sort of schedule. The very act of going to work five days a week is enough to keep me on track...buying groceries, cleaning the litterbox, actually getting dressed. Without that schedule, though, I'm jelly.

Right now I'm in the middle of a two week enforced vacation. For the most part I've been living a dreary half-life of sleeping, eating, and shuffling around aimlessly. Part of this time has been sent making sure my Sims graduate from university, but I'm proud to say that I AM in the process of accomplishing a few tasks, and I did in fact clean the litterbox this afternoon.

First, I've been reading Boswell's "Life of Johnson," which is by turns interesting and tedious. Samuel Johnson is still remembered as a man of language and wit, but it's apparent that his celebrated dinner-table ramblings were deliberately contrary and too often half-baked. What's more, they were usually little more than nasty gossip about OTHER 18th century men of wit, which means I can rarely care much about his subject matter.

Every page of "Life of Johnson" is pretty much like this:

The following night I was priveleged to dine with Samuel Johnson and his guests [Notable Reverend], [Famous Playwrite], [Respected Politician], and [Silly Annoying Person]. [Silly Annoying Person] was unfortunate in espousing his respect for [Much-Admired Scottish Poet]. Johnson wasted no time in cutting the poor man to shreds, calling any who so much as READ [Much-Admired Scottish Poet] a "blockhead," and then, turning on [Silly Annoying Person], making the pointed remark that "those who go so far as to read and then ADMIRE [Much-Admired Scottish Poet] are twice-over blockheads, who see in poetry little more than a reflection of their own inadequacies, and who are no better than the Scottish people themselves," which I felt a pretty cruel statement from so great a man.

Anyway, when I'm not wishing I could poke Samuel Johnson in his single remaining good eye, I am learning to play the bass.

Surprise! I borrowed a bass and an amp from my father, and I'm pleased to say I'm picking it up pretty well. I haven't even reached the "beginner" stage yet, but since I started last week with no knowledge of what a fret even WAS, I'm to the point where I can at least play the C Major scale and make my way through a two-octave tetrachord, which probably sounds harder than it is.

Pictures coming eventually (because it's all about the image of course).

Tolkien

A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to watch a spectacular movie, and all I could think of was Peter Jackson's adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings." I'd watched them all a few years ago and was pretty much unimpressed, but I remembered that it was at least colourful and fast-paced. And that's what I cared about.

So after about eleven hours of movie I was left with pretty much the same impression I'd had the first time: Frodo is a schlump, Sean Astin is a surprisingly weak actor (with a surprisingly bad accent), and the movie is REALLY about Aragorn, Theodin, Faramir, and Gollum. And it simply doesn't end. None of this piqued my interest much...

...but my opinion of the movies shot into the stratosphere when I watched the special features. The passion and agony of the filmmakers adds a new dimension of the movie itself, and I find myself wanting to see it all again. Someday. If just to get another glimpse of The Mouth of Saruon.

Watching venerable actors gush about the source material was enough to get me thinking: maybe I should revisit THE BOOKS? Again, I was never impressed by "The Hobbit" or "The Lord of the Rings" when I was a teenager, but at the time I was more into "Xanth" than "Beowulf." Maybe my matured and more finely-tuned aesthetics will find the same joy in Tolkien's world that Ian McKellen does?

The jury's still out. I breezed through "The Hobbit" and found it...well, breezy, though it was nifty to know more about "The Necromancer" this time around.

Mr. Old Goat himself (of Old Goat Books) is a self-confessed Tolkien obsessive, and he insisted that I read "The Silmarillion" before revisiting "The Lord of the Rings." It sure ain't no "Hobbit!" Digging through its antiquated language and almost point-form notation is like reading the books that inspired it -- the Anglo-Saxon and Norse legends -- and about as fun as The Bible. But I'm in awe of the breadth of his creation, and I hope that if I stick with it I will be rewarded.

PS: I vividly remember seeing Ralph Bakshi's adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings" in a movie theatre, and thinking that it was really damn ugly. Having since caught up with Bakshi's other work I can only marvel that his Tolkien riff was so restrained...like, no pneumatic short-skirted elves being spanked.

Logic Pro 8

There was a practical reason why I bought this new computer. It wasn't just to play "Doom 3" and "The Sims 2," or to acquire a status symbol, or to fulfill whatever bizarre ideas I had about my iPod a few months ago.

I bought this computer so I could expand my music-making capabilities, which were tightly constrained on the old eMac. Tiny screen, slow processor, 60GB hard drive, ancient operating system, USB 1.0...there just wasn't enough I could DO with it anymore, without squinting and watching the poor thing shudder and cry.

So I bought my gorgeous iMac, which suffers none of those old limitations except for one thing: my copy of Logic Audio 6 wouldn't work on it. Damn. At least there was "Doom 3."

But today, with my finances beginning to stabilize, I took my next and second-biggest step: I bought Logic Pro 8.

I sort of wonder how much I needed the Pro version, over the comparatively cheaper "Express." I have no intention of using the six DVDs of loops and "Jam Packs," which I consider to be tools for cheaters. I'll never use MainStage because I never play live, and as far as I know the effects plug-ins and soft synths are pretty much the same in both the Express and Pro versions.

Pro DOES come with a CD burning tool which looks useful, however, and if I ever want to record in surround sound or score a movie...well, I can now.

Most impressive about the Pro package is the enormous, sturdy box, which all but affirms your suspicion that You Are In Fact A Worthwhile Person. The manual for the effects alone is heavy enough to topple my cat, and the actual User Guide is over 1000 pages long. Fortunately, having launched the program and loaded in a few old projects, it looks like the interface is much the same as version 6, only beautifully integrated in a way that requires a nice big screen. No more F9 to seek and grab the six windows that are open in the background.

I'm very excited about the busses and the sampler. I can't wait to really use it...

...but the old eMac with Logic 6 has got a few more months to go, since I don't actually have a MIDI interface for this computer, and I may need to re-purchase my old plug-ins ("iDrum," "Pluggo," and "Mode") to get my old projects migrated over. More RAM would be nice, as well as a breakout box...and a hardware drum machine...and one of those fiddly USB control boxes with lots of knobs and sliders.

Anyway, hurrah!

Nights with Grandpa

Since my grandmother's birthday is coming up, I'm trying to digitize a bunch of cassette interviews that my grandfather gave to the local historical society in the late '80s. The sound quality is terrible and the content largely mundane, but what does come through is the strangeness of hearing him speak almost fifteen years after his death.

I didn't begin to care for my grandfather until it was too late. Before his illness he seemed to me to be a conservative, maddeningly slow old man who ate pigtails right out of the carton. During his protracted and painful death I began to realize who we were all losing, but by then he was too far gone to really "have a chat" with. When he actually died I was at work.

So maybe it's easier to love somebody who isn't around anymore; I can think about his strength and his friendly sensibility, instead of fighting with him about my future, and I can also admit that his lectures about my goals in life were sensible, and that I've now actually done some of the things he wanted me to.

Then...there he is on the cassette tapes, talking about his father's factory and the manufacturing process for felt. His slow, ponderous voice which took forever but always arrived at its destination. His sentence introductions which never meant anything but served to explain his own thought processes ("That is...", "You might say..."). Him just sitting in the back kitchen, chatting with an interviewer, while the clock chimes two, three, four.

It's strange.

A She-Devils Memory

While digging through old cassettes and Protools project CDs I was delighted to discover a "She-Devils On Heels" promo from 2004. This was from the "third season," when Annie first joined as co-host, and I think the promo sums up the show perfectly. So does this picture.


The commercial was very much a collaboration, though I think Annie's energy was the most crucial ingredient. What I remember most about it was forcing poor Annie to say "Do we HAVE superpowers?" about fifty times. What I remember most about that picture was...well, unsurprisingly I don't remember it at all.

Fighting the Sound Board

It's been a year since I last had the Sound Board Nightmare, but it returned last night.

In the Sound Board Nightmare I am in charge of engineering a live radio show. Things go well at first, but halfway through the currently-playing song I am unable to find a follow-up promo. I look everywhere. Nobody will help me. The final seconds of the song tick away and I quickly hit "Play" to play the next song as a substitute...but instead the song plays again, a second time.

Everybody stares at me. Something breaks down. I can't find the sheets that tell me when to play commercials. I panic, surrounded by staring eyes and dead air.

I stopped having these dreams when I stopped DJ'ing, both live shows and at CKMS. Since the demise of CKMS I have had little urge to get involved with radio again, especially not at a station that is hanging by such a tiny thread.

But there's ANOTHER community station in town, and it just so happens that a friend of mine his resigning his position, and he was looking for a replacement...

...so now I'm the Technical Director of "Monday Night with the Arts" on CKWR. I have a ton of sound mixing experience, but this is stretching my skill set a bit: a heavily scripted program, several guests on three different microphones, phone-in interviews...it's a real step up. Once I get the hang of the equipment -- and figure out how the darn Cue works -- I'm sure it will become second nature, but for now I'll suffer the Sound Board Nightmares.

Tonight was my first night, and coupled with a crippling insulin reaction I was a bit of a wreck. Fortunately the outgoing Technical Director was there to guide me, and the show didn't turn out too badly.

Besides keeping my skills polished and having something interesting to do on Monday nights, this is also an opportunity to keep up with the local Arts community...and it IS nice to be part of a radio station again...especially one so TIDY!