I'd Buy Anything By...Meat Beat Manifesto

When I worked at CKMS -- have you noticed how many of these musical anecdotes start this way? -- Eli McIlveen insisted that I watch a series of music videos by E.B.N. I was instantly hooked on the band, but since they only ever released one full album I was desperate for more. The E.B.N. album had been heavily produced and modified by a guy named "Jack Dangers," so I started looking in his direction.

Holy cow! Jack Dangers was (and is) the driving force behind "Meat Beat Manifesto," a twenty-plus year music project that has embraced ambient, trance, breakbeat, experimental, industrial, rap, and jazz. There's an odd mysteriousness about Danger's need to constantly remix and rerecord his songs, lending a continuity between different versions and a desire to "hear them all." The debut MBM release, in fact, was a double-album consisting of four songs, each drastically modified over and over and over...

His style is meticulous and lockstep, but mixed with layers of organic "messiness," preventing it from sounding sterile. He may not be the best singer in the world but he tends to compliment the slightly shoddy nature nicely. Here, for instance, is a live 2007 performance of one of their oldest songs ("God O.D."), done in their current style: loose, informal, surprisingly sweet.



MBM is perfect "do your work" music...it makes your body move but doesn't much distract your brain. It is not, however, easy to dance to, for some reason that I've never quite understood...maybe the tempo is slightly the wrong speed or the syncopation a bit wonky.

Dangers regularly contributes to the work of others, usually as producer, remixer, or collaborator. One of his more curious collaborations is the substantially unreal "Tino Corp" collective, producing albums of "beats" that are both sampleable and fun to listen to; Dangers is most effective when it comes to constructing his rhythms so this is a natural forum for him.



Albums to buy? Try "Storm the Studio" for the old-style industrial MBM, "Subliminal Sandwich" for the experimental fan-favourite, or the recent "At the Center" for the truly funky jazz. Albums to avoid: "Satyricon," an unpleasant detour into pop that went horribly, horribly wrong. For fans only: the "Tino Corp" albums, which are deliberately sparse.

A Plague of Junk and Silent Calls

About a month ago I started receiving the "Waterloo Record Save & Sell" in my mailbox. This flimsy excuse for junk-mail advertising is as thick as a phone book and gets shoved, weekly, into my tiny receptacle. It crushes legitimate mail and leaves the mailbox lid jammed open. I don't read it and I recycle it every week. What's the point?

So I finally had enough and I called their mail-carrier line. I was on hold for several minutes, but then managed to speak to a very nice person who said she'd "take me off the list." I should have asked her how I ended up on their list in the first place -- maybe I could track my pervasive junk-mail hydra back to its roots -- but I'm glad to remove at least one source of soliciting-annoyance from my door.

Incidentally, like many people I get several calls a day from telemarketers, but in most cases I pick up the phone and I don't get an answer...the line is dead. I've discovered that this is something called a "silent call" (or an "abandoned call") which means that a computer has randomly dialed the digits in my phone number and -- when I picked up the receiver -- it notified the telemarketing company that my phone was active. But since no bottom-feeding, scum-sucking telemarketers were available to respond to the pick-up at that moment, the call was simply abandoned.

Incredibly rude.

This happens about six times a week. It's a relatively slight annoyance but I can't help wondering: who regulates this stuff, and how much money do they receive from call-center lobbyists?

Creepy Pedro Episode Seven

I started writing episode seven of "Creepy Pedro" in 2001. I finally finished it this week. If you'd like to read it, go here and click on the last episode. I warn you that it's long, rambling, unpleasant, and not necessarily work-safe, but I think a lot of it is really funny.

Like all of the Creepy Pedro plays I had started it with absolutely no plan whatsoever, but this time I wrote Pedro and his friends into such a conundrum that I couldn't figure out how to get them out...you see, the second half was a parody of the sort of thinking that underlay the gleeful rush into the second Iraq war, and you know how impossible it is to deal with THAT sort of situation.

At least nobody died as a direct consequence of my writing this script.

The episode is called "The Creepy One From the Sky" and it was heavily inspired by the books I was reading at the time: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. I figured that Pedro hadn't been dropped into a fantasy setting yet, so it was about time. I was also just discovering George Saunders and I unconsciously ripped off his dialog style in a few places.

If you have the fortitude, enjoy! You don't have to read the previous episodes to understand what's going on. It will all be baffling anyway.

The Spot-Hole

Today I'm in the bathroom at work and I'm staring at the wall -- for reasons you can guess -- and I notice a little point of light.

So I look closer at it and it appears to be a small hole in the bathroom wall, about a millimeter in diameter, but when I move my head a bit the light disappears.

To make sure it isn't just a shiny fleck of paint I cup my hands around the spot...and it continues to glow. It's a bright speck buried in the darkness of my hands. It really does look like a hole.

Workmate Charles wanders over to find out why I'm lurking around the toiletries and I show him the spot, and he cups his hands around it and says "Yeah, I think it's a hole," though he also notices the way it seems to reflect a bit, as though a flake of paint were covering it slightly. Another workmate -- Matthew -- sees us acting all suspicious and so he looks too and he confirms...yes, could be a small hole, very strange.

A hole in the bathroom wall.

I leave and get a pencil from my cubicle and come back to confirm the theory; I want to poke the spot and see if the pencil goes in. I walk up to the wall...

...and I can't find the spot. I search around and around. I cup my hands and look all over. The situation is complicated by the style of the paint, which is deliberately bumpy. I call Charles back and we look together and neither of us can see anything. Meanwhile the automatic toiletries are flushing like crazy because we keep standing in front of them.

By now we have collected a small bathroom mob. Workmate Don turns off the light while I stand in front of the wall, but I can't see anything. We ascertain out where the hole should exit -- an unused, dimly-lit storage area behind the elevator -- and we search that wall as well...nothing. Just in case there WAS a fleck of paint slightly covering the hole, I get a wet paper towel and start wiping at the wall, hoping to dislodge it. Nothing.

We sit around and stare at each other. Either the little hole got covered up somehow, or it was a remarkably reflective piece of material that fell off, or we just forgot where exactly we'd been looking.

It is an unsolved mystery. Like a UFO. In the bathroom.

Beckzy Is Just Fine

My father knows his car sounds. He is the Doctor Doolittle of cars. I don't think this skill has made him very happy over the years, because cars usually just complain or scream in agony, they rarely say things like "I'm feeling GREAT!" or "I love you!"

I called my father and explained the sound that Beckzy has been making, and he immediately said, "Your power steering fluid is low. Check it out and refill it." So I took my first dive under Beckzy's hood -- she's modest that way -- and discovered that her power steering tank wasn't just LOW, it was TOTALLY EMPTY. No wonder she's been bitching.

One bottle of power steering fluid later...and Beckzy's whine has almost totally disappeared. What's more, she steers like a buttery swan, like the car she always knew she could be. When I drove her to work today ("to get the bubbles out of the fluid") she seemed to be saying what cars NEVER say to people: "I'm feeling great! Love you! And thanks, dad!"

Scrutable Poetry Corner: "Dilemma"

In keeping with the recent "cat" theme, here's "Dilemma" from the December 22, 1928 New Yorker. I actually think it's kind of lovely.

Kittens, of course, are embarrassing...
Yet, in the full o' the moon,
Who would not wander, a sinuous wraith,
Out of the door--away--
Threading the area's fragrant shades
To a fence where gallants croon,
Tiger, maltese, and tortoise,
Many a lovelorn lay?

There, where the pails gleam silver,
What rapture to pose and yawn,
Queening it over the envious swains,
Preening, alluring, heart-harassing;
Fanning to fury a duel-din
Death to the drowsy dawn!
Helen of Troy, in fur...
--But kittens, alas, are embarrassing!

This is by Harold Willard Gleason, best known for...well, nothing much that I can figure out.

He wrote some books.

Mr. Worthington Ames Presses THE WRONG FOOT

It makes me happy that things like this could have happened, once.

When Mr. Ames tasted the Duchess Soup he put his foot in it. Here was that wonderful flavor he had told his wife about. He wanted to call her attention to it. However, one must observe the social amenities. But under the table all is different. So he aims a foot pressure wifewards, which translated into husbandese means, "This soup is flavored with that Guasti Cooking Sherry I was telling you about." The lady who looks at him askance is not Mrs. Ames and she thinks Mr. Ames a gay dog.

It also amuses me to think that, at some time, people probably guzzled this heavily-salted sherry when they were unable to contact their bootlegger.

Lois Long Finally Annoys Me

I've said in the past that I enjoy Lois Long's contributions to the 1920's-era New Yorker, particularly her somewhat acerbic "Tables for Two" column (which she wrote under the name "Lipstick"). I've also said that though some scholars have accused her of being a racist, I felt that Long's racial comments were simply par for an authoress writing about Harlem nightclubs, and that I got no impression that Long was -- as charged -- more dismissive of black people than anybody else in the magazine.

Then I ran across her December 22, 1928 review of "Club Harlem."

Above 125th Street, the latest place visited was one called, quite simply, the Club Harlem. Your first impression is of very pleasing decoration--acid yellow walls with huge, foggy, dark-blue silhouettes of barbaric negroes and palm trees. The second impression is of a grand blues orchestra, principally brasses; and the third is of probably the most inferior collection of white people you can see anywhere. Possibly they are hired by the management to give the colored race magnificent dignity by contrast, but I dunno.

I'd have to do some real twisting to make this comment sound innocuous, and taken with the tone of some of her earlier writings I'll finally admit that "they" -- those few scholars who have ever mentioned Lois Long in their research -- are probably right: Long viewed the black people in Harlem as inferior to whites...but cute scenery, and LORD they could dance!

She goes on to mention a "high-yaller chorus," the first time I've heard this term in the magazine.

Canada Day at the Pool

What do you do when it's Canada Day and the sun is shining? I'll tell you: when Tracey invites you to the public pool to sunbathe and go swimming, YOU ACCEPT.

Granted, I haven't been in a public pool since I was a kid so the experience was a little foreign to me. I was surprised when we separated at the entrance to go through doors marked "BOYS" and "GIRLS." I was even more surprised when I saw signs demanding that I take a shower before entering the pool area, but everybody walked right past the showers and ignored the signs. It would have been annoying, showering with a pack of strange pre-teen boys.

The public pool is terrific for people-watching. You see all types of bodies, backgrounds, and motivations. I really do appreciate the spectacle of horny highschool students being "cool" around their girlfriends.

There was a steel band.

We lay down and oiled up and rested in the sun. Eventually I screwed up my courage and entered the pool itself, where Tracey's son taught me to breast stroke. Small children were clinging to styrofoam floats. The sky was cloudless. The water was cool. It was easy to forget that none of us had bathed.

Sometimes the lazy, chatty days are the best.

"The Soul of a New Machine"

I'm re-reading Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine." The first time I read it I was most interested in the technical aspects, but this time I'm concentrating more on Kidder's ability to describe his subject with beautiful prose, which is strange considering it's a book about a bunch of engineers designing a computer.

The following paragraphs, I think, are Kidder's crowning achievements and indicative of the book as a whole. Like much of his best writing, you don't need to understand what's going on in order to get to the heart of the issue: a human being, swimming in the unnatural world of equations and electronics, trying to grasp what he's seeing...and working under an impossible amount of stress. All that said, this scene is still and quiet, as most awful situations really are:

Something has happened. The straight white line that was running across the little blue screen has rearranged itself into a jagged shape, like a diagram of two teeth on one side of a zipper. Rosen is staring at the picture, his nails raised to his mouth. Slowly, still staring, he rotates his hand and takes most of his knuckles in his teeth. For a long moment, he holds this position, frozen like the image on the screen.

It might be a painting of a nightmare by Goya. Your eye is drawn from the young man's face and the hand resting in his teeth, to the jagged line on the screen, which is in fact a picture of an electronic event that took place, in infinitesimal time, just a moment ago. Though it is a common sort of picture, often seen in the lab, all of a sudden it has become dreadful. But who can say why?

Kidder earned his Pulitzer Prize.