Adventures w/ garageband

I finally have time to tinker in the studio again, and since I'm sick of my own songs, I've been jollifying myself with covers. Moving the iMac to the basement has brought it close to the musical equipment; as such, experiments with Garageband have begun. I'm not a big loops dude, and I'm veering away from MIDI sequencing these past couple years, so I use Garageband as a straight audio and overdubs recorder.
A simple example is my cover of Randy Newman's homage to law enforcement officials, Jolly Coppers on Parade [3616 Kb m4a audio], from Little Criminals (Lyrics at randynewman.com).
An easy way to build up a cover is to drag the original track from your iTunes playlist into Garageband, which creates a track for it. Then you overdub parts on new tracks by playing or singing along with the original. It's great practice and it helped me appreciate Newman's arranging skills that much more.

Talk of Peak in Oil Production

... has finally hit the mainland.

Housing Bubble

Paul Krugman in The New York Times this morning. Is the Fed propping up the economy through a series of bubbles? Is it running out of bubbles?

Soldiers of Christ

Soldiers of Christ at Harpers.org is an indispensible read, a glimpse into the twisted world of American megachurches. The profile of New Life Church in Colorado Springs and its Pastor Ted Haggard, advisor to President Bush, is more than revealing.

Space junk

Anthony Lane lustily rips apart Star Wars Episode III in The New Yorker: "What Lucas has devised, over six movies, is a terrible puritan dream: a morality tale in which both sides are bent on moral cleansing, and where their differences can be assuaged only by a triumphant circus of violence. Judging from the whoops and crowings that greeted the opening credits, this is the only dream we are good for. We get the films we deserve."
Last night Stacy and I watched episode II on DVD, which I had wisely avoided up until now. Anticipating that I might subject myself to the final chapter of the prequel triology, I figured I might as well bone up and take some notes. Episode II was a wretched mess. If Lane is even partially right, the last installment will be little better. The Star Wars opus, now that it has been fully realized, deserves to be beamed up to the satellite of love, where Joel, Mike, and the 'bots could give it the proverbial Mystery Science Theater treatment. I've pretty much concluded that the only decent Star Wars film was the first one, a wonderfully rendered space fantasy with some mythic resonance and a few characters you could care about. Geroge Lucas should have stopped there, much as Rocky should have hung up the gloves after film one. Let's face it. Everything since is so much galactic clutter, imaginatively vapid, narrative-challenged space junk.

What if Honest Abe used Powerpoint?

Peter Norvig's funny rendering of the Gettysburg Address as a Powerpoint Presentation. An oldie but goodie!

ZATAOMM

I've discovered an online full text copy of Robert Pirsig's bookZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, "reprinted with permission".

Leave My Child Alone!

Leave My Child Alone! is a project to inform and protect parents and children from predatory military recruiters, who thanks to the No Child Left Behind law, have access to high schools' personal information about your kids. Get informed and opt out.

Bill Moyers on media reform

Bill Moyers' speech to the National Conference for Media Reform is a long but worthy read. Corporation for Public Broadcasting chief Kenneth Tomlinson is pilloried effectively, as Moyers tries to put the public back in PBS.

Norman Mailer on On Sartre's God Problem

Interesting piece in The Nation by Norman Mailer assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Sartre's thought.

The Secret Way to War

Mark Danner analyzes the Downing St. memo for NYRB. Includes a copy of the memo itself.

The Downing Street Memo

I know it's restating the obvious by this point, but since our culture is so fond of forgetting and so eager to see reality as a show and facts reduced to opinion, it might behoove us to remember just how foolishly the coalition of the willing and cognitively-challenged got mired in the messy bog of death and corruption called Iraq. The Times of London has recently reported on a leaked memo, which you can read and analyze in its entirety, that essentially proves what the more perceptive among us had figured out long ago, that the American and British governments intentionally sought to deceive their people over the war in Iraq. It was the summer of 2002, and they had already made up their minds. Had you been paying attention and not been among the cretins who believe everything they read and see without subjecting claims to even the mildest critical reflection, you probably would have never taken at face value such unsupported assertions as the existence of Iraq's WMDs, Iraq's masterminding of the 9/11 attacks, or Iraq's being a threat to its neighbors. Now we know with about as much certainty as we're likely to get before the real histories get written years beyond, that the whole thing was indeed built upon a "pack of lies." This was a war pursued for unjust, fallacious reasons, and we will be suffering the consquences for years if not decades. OK, morons, back to your "desparate housewives" reruns and celebrity fantasy cribs.

Cronysim amongst the versifiers

Did you ever submit work to a poetry contents, pay your fee, and wonder with a tinge of sickness in your heart, that the whole contest might be rigged, and that the winners might be intimates of the people judging the contest? Foetry.com is documenting dodgy writing contests, unscrupulous judges, questionable screening practices, and other bogus activities. I think it's good to expose the rigging and nepotism going on, as it has real implications for writers struggling to earn respect and creative writing jobs.

The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid

This important article by Michael Hudson from last month's Harper's magazine ferrets out what might be the hidden agenda behind Bush's social security plan -- manufacturing a boom, a "bush bubble" if you will. To do that means finding money to fuel it. That money will come from social security.

Stages of semester death

aka. Stations of the cross... stage 1: the final deadline. students hand in their work. Not all the students. Mysteriously, several never show up. stage 2: trickle down. in dribs and drabs the tardy papers arrive by campus mail, email, stuffed under office doors in the middle of the night. stage 3: gradeland. furious, Herculean spurts of fitful speed grading as one races towards the final grades deadline. stage 4: the final accounting. the waiting and the grading is over. the grades computed, recorded. the die is cast! stage 5: left behind. more late papers come in, but alas, the time for grading has passed. the papers are sent to the island of orphaned assignments. stage 6: questions and answers. disgruntled and amazed students sent email queries wondering why their grade was lower than expected. could have something to do with the half dozen missed classes, pitiful portfolios, quiz meltdowns, and gaping holes in the spreadsheet where assignments should be. Responses are dispatched with coolness. stage 7: empire falls. it is over, but one continues to check and respond to email, putting out fires, dousing the flames with buckets of explanations and statements of syllabus policy. One feels the spew of non-believing victims of the reality principle hurled upon one's head from metaphysical spaces and brainy wormholes. Assailed by venomous dragon bites of rebel angels, a strong desire arises from the wellsprings to remove oneself to an undisclosed location, or at least to go fishing.

Go Longhorns!

I feel safer knowing that Ann Coulter's virgin ears are well protected by the University of Texas police, don't you? A woman who'd never offend anyone...

Apple's Next Big Thing

Why has the latest version of iTunes shipped with unused icons for competing file formats like WMA? And what's prompting Bill Gates to talk-up the HD Video capabilities of xBox2 suddenly? Is it due to Apple's acquiring 58% of the flash player market, 90% of the hard drive player market, 70% of the online music market (this month's data, by the way)... and they're about to declare victory (open the platform) and push forward into online movie sales? All of this while Microsoft has yet to field significant competition in the music market? I think Cringely's right on this one. ALL of the pieces are in place for Apple. The latest version of QuickTime (the one that shipped with Tiger) is amazingly crisp. There's really no other way to interpet Jobs' statements about this being the Year of HD Video. And Apple's got the street cred' to pull it off. Meanwhile, Microsoft is preoccupied with building bigger and better security patches.... and pitching their latest Longhorn marketechture.

New York Times Op-Ed on Bush and Darfur

Nicholas D. Kristof writes, "The last time Mr. Bush let the word Darfur slip past his lips publicly (to offer a passing compliment to U.S. aid workers, rather than to denounce the killings) was Jan. 10. So today marks Day 113 of Mr. Bush's silence about the genocide unfolding on his watch."

Later Poems of Yeats

Sacred-texts.com just published this 1922 anthology selected by Yeats himself. Plenty of classic work to find in there.

Forbes: Microsoft v. Google

I found this very interesting. Call me crazy but I think Microsoft is already crumbling under it's own weight. This is going to be a very long, slow, tortured death. Unlike Jobs, I don't think Gates has what it takes to reinvent that company--it needs a hell of a lot more than a strategic realignment. The distinction between science and technology comes to mind (technology as applied science). Microsoft is packed full of scientists with exceptional IQs.... and, yet, Apple is running circles around them with a fraction of the resources and a bunch of people that have passion for technology. Same with Google.

This quote from a Google exec says it all...

"One of the criticisms that the media makes is to compare Google to previous-generation companies [like Microsoft]. Google is trying to solve the next problem, not the last problem."

Buyer's remorse

The big idea running through my mind today, the last day of classes, was that I should have been carrying a stake, hammer, and crucifix in my bag. There should have been an vampire effigy of the semester on the lawn, where we could have rituallly killed off the spring term, make sure it was dead before we left it to rot among the cherry blossoms.
All this makes it sound more gloomy than it was, yet on the T.S. Eliot "Hollow Men" scale, my ending, I have to admit, is all whimpers, no bangs. The papers continue to trickle in like the rainwater dripping from a leaky gutter. It's spring, it's over. And not over. I'll get over it.
I keep hearing from students how sour they are about their college experience. Not everyone, mind you, just enough to raise an eyebrow. Retention is a familiar problem to all colleges, and freshmen are especially prone to drop out or change schools after year one. There's nothing new to report here, and I have no numbers to cite. It's just an artist's hunch that our incoming classes, who are so media saturated and yet so media gullible, don't have the critical faculties to sniff out a bad match. They believe the brochures and the campus tour guides. They drink the punch and sign on, completely unaware of what a college should be offering them. So they learn by living through it, suffering and slogging through the long march of fall and spring. They get to the end and they're walking around stunned, not sure what has happened, trying to process it all. It's happened to me before (cf. grad school), so I guess I'm a little sensitive to the signs of woe. Maybe the hard lesson learned is that college isn't minty toothpaste, a car lease, or clearance rack clothing. It shouldn't be sold that way, and to herd the student/consumers in like happy pack animals isn't the right way to recruit or retain them. It creates resentment and remorse, apathy and bitterness, depression and sputtering desires.

Quick review of Tiger

Saint Nate mostly likes what he sees in the new Mac OS X version.

Good TV news

Something to smile about: The Daily Show's Steven Colbert is getting his own show.

There's somethin' happening here...

An article from PhillyBurbs.com (never heard of it) about a 13 year-old that has raised $13,000 for ending the genocide in Darfur. I'm reading and hearing more about young people getting active about our world.

Here's another from the Chicago Tribune.

If you haven't seen it already, there's a documentary floating about campuses regarding the Invisible Children of the Sudan. It's worth checking out. Here's the teaser. Video technology has become so accessible and it's inspiring to see how it's being applied. This change could run deep.

Word of the day: depletion

Oil Depletion Analysis Centre overview provides a good one page background brief on the nature and scope of the oil production downturn.

The end of oil is closer than you think

Good story from Guardian Unlimited about looming oil crisis as we approach peak production, which incidentally, we may already have passed. If you like horror stories, read it.