Drop the needle
I couldn’t wait for the CD so I purchased the new Biosphere album Dropsonde in vinyl, my first record purchase in four years or so. Coming on the heels of my recent Boards of Canada fake-track debacle (only possible in these digital music-obsessed days) it was a completely enjoyable, material experience. I was instantly in grade school again, fetishizing the platter and poring over the cover art as if I held a Rembrandt in my hands. Of course I immediately digitized it and have embarked on the daunting — though so pleasingly nostalgic — task of doing the same for all the 33’s and 45’s that I do not own digitally. On some of the records I actually remember every scratch and hiss as if they were part of the original recording.
Ways in which vinyl is better than bits:
– Imperfections in the vinyl, especially those caused by the owner (needle dropped too hard, flattening of the grooves from overplay, etc.) make that album more personal, indelibly stamping it as unique and yours-alone. Call it analog watermarking.
– At a glance you can instantly see the relative durations of all the songs on a side. Sorta like the advantage of an analog watch. You only need spatial awareness to see that you have a quarter of a circle’s worth of time before your meeting.
– Perfectly hitting the blank grooves between songs with the stylus is damn satisfying.
– Cover art, cover art, cover art. Bigger, badder, bolder.
And the album Dropsonde? It is as good as they say. Geir appears to be infatuated with jazz percussion. The minimalism of Autour de la Lune is gone and occasionally a higher-range line (“melody” would be imprecise) takes over in a way reminiscent of his older work. Highly recommended.
Black Sox no longer
Last night I had the crazy notion that, with a world champion team to call their own, White Sox fans would lose the massive chip on their shoulders about the Cubs. You’d not know it these days, but Cubs fans greatly outnumber Sox fans in the city and throughout the country (thanks to years of national coverage by WGN). Wrigley Field is a tourist destination by itself and while the new new Comiskey — pardon me, The Cell — is a great park, it still doesn’t hold a candle to Cubs field and Wrigleyville. This has nothing to do with the quality of the respective sports teams, of course. It is all about the perceived sense of importance to the city. (And perhaps lingering guilt over the team’s scandalous collusion with gamblers in 1919?)
Will the inferiority complex dissipate now that the Sox are the champs?
Headmuffs
I have too many types of headphones I think.
- Earbuds for iPod listening during the commute. (Apple iPod Earbud Headphones, not the ones that come with the iPod — decent sound, not great)
- Sweat-proof, collapsible headphones for running (Sony MDR-A35G S2 Sports Headphones — love these, sweat is not an issue and I am one sweaty bastard)
- Crappy earbuds for inserting under hat when running outside in winter (whatever)
- Noise-cancelling for long plane flights and at work (Sennheiser PXC 250 — LOVE these, highly recommended)
- Big padded ones for make-believe DJ’ing (Sennheiser HD 202 — nothin’ special)
When I travel I actually have three of these in my backpack. That’s ridiculous. What is my problem?
Reluctant cheerleader
The World Series has me in a real dilemma.
Fact #1: I greatly dislike the White Sox. Or rather, I’m no fan of their fans who, you can be sure, would not be cheering on the Cubs if by some cosmic anomaly they made it to the World Series.
Fact #2: I love Chicago and I love that any of our sports teams is so dominant.
Fact #3: I am married to a woman with a great deal of family in Houston (more since Katrina) and so
must deal with a large pro-Houston lobby.
I suppose it is better than a Sox-Cardinals series. That would have been too much for any Cubs fan.
Grandpa’s gonna spin in his grave, but … Go Chicago!
The steam will rise again
Perhaps catering to its larger blue collar readership, the Sun-Times scooped the Trib in covering a story of great importance to the public bathers of the city. The good news is that the Division Street Baths are closed for remodelling and will reopen next year most likely, just in time for its 100th birthday. Thank goodness, but why on earth would they do this over the winter when we need it most?
Kudos to Greer for tracking this down. And, May, if you’re not demoted at the Tribune for dropping this particular lead I may ask my vast readership to start a blogging campaign highlighting your journalist negligence.
Viva fat sweaty men flagellating themselves with oak switches!
See also: Sensory deprivation
One show, daily
I attended a taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart today in NYC. Great fun. Actually way more fun than I thought it would be. I guess I just figured it would be a little sterile in a studio setting, but it was actually funnier. For instance, I always assumed that the correpondent reports that are filed from “Baghdad” and “Washington D.C.” — obviously in front of a green screen — were at least done backstage or something. In fact, the correspondents are mere feet from Stewart on stage and watching his off-camera reaction to their reports is hilarious. Sometimes it felt like he didn’t know what they were going to say, though of course it is scripted and flowing past on the telepromters. The staff cracks up constantly too — and why not? Just great to see how much everyone enjoys the show. There’s a bit of a pre-show standup routine by a staffer that was really quite funny and then Stewart comes out to answer some audience questions. One guy asked Stewart how he felt about the fans who purchased the old show set on eBay and are touring around the country. He said he had not heard about it — which I find very hard to believe. (Thanks for the tickets, Matty!)
Please standby
Seems the blog’s database is corrupt — which has screwed up rebuilds, feeds, and search. Movable Type recommends upgrading to 3.2 and starting from a fresh db instance. Ugh.
So buckle up. It’ll be a bit bumpy around here for a while.
Gridwork
Circa 2:30pm, Oct. 18. Crossing Chicago River eastward on Lake Street.
Out of steam
Something’s up at the Division Street Baths, last of the venerable public steam and sauna houses in the city and one of my favorite wintertime retreats. The door is shuttered, the phone number is disconnected, and there’s no notice of any kind about why it is closed. The baths have such a loyal following and checkered past that the complete silence seems very odd.
My pal Greer who is both a bath devotee and a novice gumshoe emailed Jesse Jackson, Jr. — like his dad, a long-time fan of the baths — who replied that he had no idea what had happened but that he was not pleased about it. Greer then called Alderman Flores whose office replied that the bath house building is undergoing complete renovation and should reopen in the spring.
But why no notice on the building? Why is the phone number disconnected? Something is not right here. Health code violation? Mafia?
Me and my three readers disagree
Jakob Nielsen, geek advisor to the corporate masses who think they grok usability, has a column on the usability of weblogs this week. Over the last year or so I’ve watched Nielsen’s always-tenuous grasp of the relationship of style to user experience slowly give way to a highly corporatized version of what constitutes good web design. In the current column he advises all kinds of wacky stuff but the one piece that clinches his inability to grasp what is truly happening in the blogosphere (yes, Jakob, I know you hate that word) is that he actually advises personal bloggers to stay on-topic or else risk appealing to the “low-value demographic” who actually read for diversity rather than singularity of topic. On-topic for a personal blog? Isn’t that the opposite of writing about and for yourself?
If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.
Oh, really? A separate blog each time I plan on changing topics?
Good god this man does not get it.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
Explorations of place in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from my time on The Heavy Leather Horror Show 2023-2026.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
