Learning the ropes with iZotope ain’t no joke. All I’ve been able to do so far is maximize the dynamic range and kill most clipping. Problem is most of the sound data is crowd noise. Here is what I have so far but I’d like to bring the guitar and vocals out in front a lot more.
This was originally part of the below post on Acosta but it didn’t quite fit. So I will make it an independent post. Hunter S. Thompson was extremely capable of capturing a print of any person he met, even briefly. I remember reading the following and finding myself amazed by how quickly and seamlessly he could switch gears from McGovern and the black pool of New Hampshire primary politics to the delicate and thoughtful analysis of another human being out in the world getting shit on.
Also, these paragraphs serve a good explanation as to why some people just don’t give a fuck about elections. You’ve met these people, surely, and if you think about their reasons…maybe they’re on the right track. I don’t like the circus either. It really is like bridge.
So here, Thompson describes a young girl he picked up on the road who had so many personal problems hanging on her sleeve – and no methods to deal with them – a national election was a universe away from her:
I was as guilty as all the others, that year, of treating the McCarthy campaign as a foredoomed exercise in noble futility. We had talked about it a lot—not only in the Wayfarer bar, but also in the bar of the Holiday Inn where Nixon was staying—and the press consensus was that the only Republican with a chance to beat Johnson was Nelson Rockefeller . . . and the only other possible winner was Bobby Kennedy, who had already made it clear—both publicly and privately—that he would definitely not run for President 1968.
I was remembering all this as I cranked the big green Coug along U.S. 93 once again, four years later, to cover another one these flakey New Hampshire primaries. The electorate in the state is notoriously perverse and unpredictable. In 1964, for instance, it was a thumping victory in the New Hampshire primary that got the Henry Cabot Lodge steamroller off to a roaring start . . . and in ‘68, Gene McCarthy woke up on the morning of election day to read in the newspapers that the last minute polls were nearly unanimous in giving him between six and eight percent of the vote . . . and even McCarthy was stunned, I think, to wake up twenty-four hours later and find himself with 42 percent.
Strange country up here; New Hampshire and Vermont appear to be the East’s psychic answer to Colorado and New Mexico—big lonely hills laced with back roads and old houses where people live almost aggressively by themselves. The insularity of the old timers, nursing their privacy along with their harsh right-wing politics, is oddly similar and even receptive to the insularity of the newcomers, the young dropouts and former left-wing activists—-people like Andy Kopkind and Ray Mungo, co-founder of the Liberation News Service-—who’ve been moving into these hills in ever increasing numbers since the end of the Sixties. The hitchhiker you find along these narrow twisting highways look exactly like the people you see on the roads around Boulder and Aspen or Taos.
The girl riding with me tonight is looking for an old boyfriend who moved out of Boston and is now living, she says, in a chicken coop in a sort of informal commune near Greenville, N.H. It is five or six degrees above zero outside and she doesn’t even have a blanket, much less a sleeping bag, but this doesn’t worry her. “I guess it sounds crazy,” she explains. “We don’t even sleep together. He’s just a friend. But I’m happy when I’m with him because he makes me like myself.”
Jesus, I thought. We’ve raised a generation of stone desperate cripples. She is twenty-two, a journalism grad from Boston University, and now—-six months out of college—-she talks so lonely and confused that she is eagerly looking forward to spending a few nights in a frozen chicken coop with some poor bastard who doesn’t even know she’s coming.
The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the Coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era-—but nobody guessed, back then, that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.
The girl was not interested in whatever reasons I might have for going up to Manchester to spend a few days with the McGovern campaign. She had no plans to vote in any election, for President or anything else.
She tried to be polite, but it was obvious after two or three minutes of noise that she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and cared less. It was boring; just another queer hustle in a world full of bummers that will swarm you every time if you don’t keep moving.
Like her ex-boyfriend. At first he was only stoned all the time, but now he was shooting smack and acting very crazy. He would call and say he was on his way over, then not show up for three days-—and then he’d be out of his head, screaming at her, not making any sense.
It was too much, she said. She loved him, but he seemed to be drifting away. We stopped at a donut shop in Marlboro and I saw she was crying, which made me feel like a monster because I’d been saying some fairly hard things about “junkies” and “loonies” and “doomfreaks.”
Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that half the people you meet live from one day to the next in state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they doubt their own sanity.
These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up in depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.
This girl I was delivering up to the chicken coop was one of those people. She was terrified of almost everything, including me, and this made me very uncomfortable.
We couldn’t find the commune. The directions were to “Go far to the dim yellow light, then right at the big tree . . . proceed to the fork and then slow to the place where the road shines. . . .”
After two hours of this I was half crazy. We had been back and forth across the same grid of backroads two or three times, with no luck . . . but finally we found it, a very peaceful-looking place on a cold hill in the woods. She went inside the main building for a while, then came back out to tell me everything was OK.
I shrugged, feeling a little sad because I could tell by the general vibrations that things were not really “OK.” I was tempted take her into Manchester with me, but I knew that would only compound the problem for both of us . . . checking into the Wayfarer at 3:30, then up again at seven for a quick breakfast, and then into the press bus for a long day of watching McGovern shake hands with people at factory gates.
Could she handle that madness? Probably not. And even if she could, why do it? A political campaign is a very narrow ritual, where anything weird is unwelcome. I am trouble enough by myself; they would never tolerate me if I showed up with a nervous blonde nymphet who thought politics was some kind of game played by old people, like bridge.
No, it would never do. But on my way into Manchester, driving werewolf, it never occurred to me that maybe I was not quite as sane as I’d always thought I was. There is something seriously bent, when you think on it, in the notion that a man with good would race out of his peaceful mountain home in Colorado and fly off in a frenzy like some kind of electrified turkey buzzard three or four days being carried around the foulest sections of New England like a piece of meat, to watch another man, who he wants to be President, embarrassing a lot of people by making them shake his hand outside factory gates at sunrise.
Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ‘72
pp 62-65
If you’ve never heard of Oscar, the following obituary, written sometime after he was probably murdered on a sailboat loaded with coke, sheds some light on his composition. Written by Hunter S. Thompson:
Oscar was a wild boy. He stomped on any terra he wandered into, and many people feared him….His birthday is not noted on any calendar, and his death was barely noticed….But the hole that he left was a big one, and nobody even tried to sew it up. He was a player. He was Big. And when he roared into your driveway at night, you knew he was bringing music, whether you wanted it or not.
I have never liked writing about him, because it makes me think too much, and I can never find the right words to explain the terrible joy that he brought with him wherever he went…. You had to be there, I guess, and you had to understand that the man was never comfortable unless he was in the company of people who were crazier than he was.
When he died, I wrote an epitaph, and I don’t feel like doing it again, so here is what it felt like at the time…Res Ipsa Loquitor.Oscar Zeta Acosta-despite any claims to the contrary-was a dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking monument to the notion that a man with a greed for the Truth should expect no mercy and give none….
When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar’s name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity, and generosity in that overweight, overworked and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar’s size for the rest of our lives-which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.
By the time I first met him, in the summer of 1967, he was long past what he called his “puppy love trip with The Law” It had gone the same way as his earlier missionary zeal, and after the one year of casework at an East Oakland “poverty law center,” he was ready to dump Holmes and Brandeis for Huey Newton and a Black Panther style of dealing with the laws and courts of America.
When he came booming into a bar called Daisy Duck in Aspen and announced that he was the trouble we’d all been waiting for, he was definitely into the politics of confrontation-and on all fronts: in the bars or the courts or even the streets, if necessary.
Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach-but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of thirty-three-just like Jesus Christ-you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the bastard is already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can’t handle any more raw tequila.
This was the Brown Buffalo in the full crazed flower of his prime-a man, indeed, for all seasons. And it was somewhere in the middle of his thirty-third year, in fact, when he came out to Colorado-with his faithful bodyguard Frank-to rest for a while after his grueling campaign for sheriff of Los Angeles County, which he lost by a million or so votes. But in defeat, Oscar managed to create an instant political base for himself in the vast Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles-where even the most conservative of the old-line “Mexican-Americans” were suddenly calling themselves “Chicanos” and getting their first taste of tear gas at “La Raza” demonstrations, which Oscar was quickly learning to use as a fire and brimstone forum to feature himself as the main spokesman for a mushrooming “Brown Power” movement that the LAPD called more dangerous than the Black Panthers.
The weird grapevine will not wither for the lack of bulletins, warnings, and other twisted rumors of the latest Brown Buffalo sightings. He will be seen at least once in Calcutta, buying nine-year-old girls out of cages on the White Slave Market…and also in Houston, tending bar at a roadhouse on South Main that was once the Blue Fox.. .or perhaps once again on the midnight run to Bimini: standing tall on his own hind legs in the cockpit of a fifty-foot black cigarette boat with a silver Uzi in one hand and a magnum of smack in the other, always running ninety miles an hour with no lights and howling Old Testament gibberish at the top of his bleeding lungs….
It might even come to pass that he will suddenly appear on my porch in Woody Creek on some moonless night when the peacocks are screeching with lust… .Maybe so, and that is one ghost who will always be welcome in this house, even with a head full of acid and a chain of bull maggots around his neck.
Yeah, that’s him, folks- my boy, my brother, my partner in too many crimes. Oscar Zeta Acosta. Stand back. He is gone now but even his memory stirs up winds that will blow heavy cars off the road. He was a monster, a true child of the century-faster than Bo Jackson and crazier than Neal Cassady… When the Brown Buffalo disappeared, we all lost one of those high notes that we will never hear again. Oscar was one of God’s own prototypes-a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die….
Hunter S. Thompson March 1989
Initially I thought a great first post for this site of mine would be a full clip of Oscar Zeta Acosta’s visceral reading of a chapter from his book “Revolt of the Cockroach People”, which was included as an extra on the Criterion edition of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (but prior to that likely lurking on a half demagnetized-reel-to-reel), and perhaps some commentary from me on the nature of the video and how his reading struck me. I got caught up in technical matters of displaying the clip below so it took longer.
When I got neck deep into Hunter T. territory I noted his lawyer friend in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas “Gonzo” as Someone to Look Into – in that story, his fire was HOT and he may have existed on another plane all together. So after looking into him I determined he was Significant with a capital fucking S. Son of a Mexican Navyman given citizenship for service, Oscar grew up in a small shack on in Modesto, California and went on to find and reject religion, music, and the practice of law. The man was a prominent figure in the Brown Power movement of East Los Angeles of the late 60s and early 70’s, speaking and screaming at rallies, defending groups charged with inciting to riot, and at times sinking into the Brown Power Machinery completely as an insider.
Many think Thompson created the gonzo style – the recording of events by an author involved with the events in question, weaving personal thoughts and meditations on the nature of their progression, and other things, into the narrative – but some believe it was brought forth through collaboration with Acosta. But depending on how far one reaches into the evidence presented by Acosta’s two books, which were written in true Gonzo style, and his anger and threatened lawsuit directed at Rolling Stone and Hunter Thompson for appropriating his style – this assertion could be challenged.
My opinion on the matter lies somewhere in-between: Thompson was obviously tracking close to the self-involved style that would later evolve into Gonzo in 1970, when he wrote The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved. But he met Acosta in 1967 in Aspen, so the two could have mutually influenced each other. Let me be clear: I believe Oscar Zeta Acosta to be of equal weight, in the capacity of wordsmith, as Thompson. No fucking joke – read his two novels and you will feel pain and longing and alienation like you haven’t before, but also just enough hope and glimmer to make it stick. Acosta focused inward in his writing, searching for identity and place. Thompson’s work traced these lines occasionally but his focus was broader.
Acosta possessed great talent and ability as a writer which was only exacerbated by his immense dedication to what he thought was worth fighting for and near-fanatical personal sense of purpose, mostly to do with his so-called predetermined destiny, or his identity as “The Brown Buffalo”, his fighting Chicano avatar.
This self-conscious, sometimes fat, mostly sick and doomed, mad brilliant and kind (mostly) motherfucker was the real fucking shit. He said it, he meant it, he did it. Whether representing Chicano activists, sailing Molotov cocktails exploding on East LA front yards at night or putting the whole LAPD on trial for racism to invalidate a prosecution – a man in want of purpose he was not. His thoughts on the nature of identity, race, belonging, rejection & sorrow and the concept of “home” punched me straight in the soul and changed me forever.
Here Acosta describes seeing his sister Teresa for the first time in years, meeting her new husband and quietly rejecting most of it. She mentions the Chicano Militants and suggests he look into doing something with civil rights:
The next morning I get up early. Twenty-five each of bends, squats, backbends and pushups. I am still in training. I must hunt my story with all the brains and muscle thirty-three years of dissolute living have left me. I shave at the porcelain sink which is an open grave of cockroaches. Because I haven’t seen my sister in over five years, I put on the only decent thing I have to wear, the blue suit my father gave me when I graduated from law school two years ago. I had only gotten the degree and my license to prove that even a fat brown Chicano like me could do it. But my father thought it was worth a new suit as well. I even wore it for nine months while I practiced at sounding like a lawyer in a Legal Aid Office in the slums of East Oakland. Now, of course, it is much too big on me, but it’s the only thing left from those days, before the mad cross-country scampering with Stonewall and his crazy hippie friends, looking for the right questions and answers in a life of dope and easy living. Which somehow has tossed me up broke and still hunting in the City of Angels.
She picks me up in front of the hotel. I haven’t seen Teresa since she was in the Army. She joined the WACs straight out of Oakdale High while I was still overseas with the fighting 573rd Air Force Band. Now she is twenty-five and filled out. Her long black hair is still the same but her fingernails are violet, I guess because she has come to own half a beauty joint. She is so seriously beautiful beside me in her car that I can’t get over it. Just looking at her, I can tell she doesn’t bow down to anything or anyone. I haven’t thought of her as a sexual object since the age of twelve when I tried to French kiss her. She was only four at the time. But now, my parents tell me, she has married a Marine who quit the service to work as a contract administrator for the aerospace industry.
“Your name is Hurley?” I say to her as we buzz down the freeway toward Canoga Park, a San Fernando Valley suburb of LA.
“What’s wrong with that?” Such is our total conversation on the road.
We arrive at the Hurley homestead, a huge breadbox with a white picket fence, a kidney in the back yard for swimming, and a two-car garage. Kids on mini-bikes are criss-crossing in front of every mown lawn on the block, so I know it isn’t going to work out even before Dave Hurley gets home. Inside, the thick carpets, the Keane paintings of big-eyed children, the rubber elephant ears and velvet throne in the corner to remind me of the life I left behind when I escaped Law and Oakland. In the space of five martinis, it becomes clear she considers me a renegade. I drink water as I explain that my story must be something I believe in. Both of us know I have always been a fanatic. I don’t write from a detached point of view. Finally, after she downs another three big ones, she asks me out of the blue:
“What about politics?”
I laugh hard. I can just see a dope addict, a bum like me with all my vices, with my love of wild women and song, ex-Baptist missionary in Panama, ex-clarinet player, ex-peach picker-football tackle-parking lot attendant-lawyer, ex-everything, I can just see me running for public office.
“Not as a politician,” she says. “I mean like, you know, the civil rights thing.”
“I’ve been there.”
“Yeah, but that was with niggers.” She refilled her glass again, reminding me of me back when. “Have you ever heard of the Chicano Militants?” Then she begins to explain about some greasers, “sort of like the Black Panthers,” who are kicking up dust in East LA. They even have a small newspaper but, before she can get any deeper, her old man comes in.
Dave Hurley has fat lips, blue eyes below blond hair stuck in a plain white envelope. From the first second I see him, I know he is no match for my tough sister. He kisses her dutifully, shakes hands with me, and then disappears to make us breakfast.
“So you got a Sancho to do your work for you, eh?” I say with a smile. She grins, back.
Over bacon and eggs, Hurley explains to me the projects he is working on to benefit the US Army against the Viet Cong. I don’t even bother to punch him in the mouth.
Then the two of them are off to some art show so they drop me back at the Belmont. Teresa gives me a big goodbye hug before she drives off. She promises to come visit me and hopes I find my story. But all the time I see how she’s trapped, chained by herself to that blue-eyed fag and his promise of more make-up and martinis. Only after they have vanished into the smog do I realize that I forgot to hit her for a loan. It’s Sunday; I couldn’t even hustle a job if I felt like it. So I go back up to my room to ponder my fate.
But before I have the door unlocked an idea hits me: my cousin Manuel whom I haven’t seen in over ten years. Almost a year ago, I’d sent him a telegram at his mother’s house. It said simply, “Send $150 or I go to jail . . . Oscar.” Two days later the money arrived without a word or signature. I spent all of it on two whores in Juarez before I sobered up.
The next thing I know is that I have blown my last few bucks on a cab and found him at his bar, Manny’s Fish Bowl. We are sitting at the counter, digging into some burritos his mother made for the occasion.
Manuel stands six-foot five-inches tall. They used to call him Spider when he high-jumped for the University of Southern California in the early fifties. He was one of the first men in the country to clear the bar at 6′ 8″. After he failed to qualify for the 1952 Olympics he lost interest and faith in himself. He married while still in school, had children and took his Masters, ending up as a coach for a small junior college in South-Central Los Angeles. Now he owned Manny’s Fish Bowl in East LA where all his old college chums and high school buddies come and reminisce over cold Coors. He starts on the booze five minutes after I walk in.
“Hey, man. How come you never made it beyond 6′8″?”
This is just part of our small talk but Manuel goes into instant depression. He bows his heavy jowls, plays with the glass of scotch and sighs deeply.
“You don’t jump beyond that without help.”
“But you were jumping better than anyone else your sophomore year . . . Was it booze, a broad, or what?”
“I told you, I didn’t know how. You can only go so far on your own, then you need someone to show you the rest.”
“You guys had the best coach in the business.”
He gives me a dirty look, as if angry for my even mentioning the subject. He downs his glass and spits out, “That sonofabitch. He spent all his time with the other guys.” And then a monologue, more therapy than information. His coach, George Mudd, had deliberately not taught him how to jump higher. Mudd never liked him, he said. From the beginning, he was on his own. When the year came around for the Olympics, the coach simply turned his back on him.
“Because you’re Chicano?”Manuel stares at me a long time before he answers. “I haven’t been able to come up with any other reason for the past ten years.”
We quietly eat re-fried beans. I ask him if he’s heard of the Chicano Militants. He laughs and tells me they are just a bunch of young punk communists who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. “They blame all their troubles on everybody but themselves.”
I laugh at the irony. I ask if he isn’t doing the same thing with his failure to qualify for the Olympics.
So he screams at me: “That’s different! I worked my ass off! I made it on my own. No one gave me a thing. You don’t see me going around crying, asking the government for a handout.”We get into heavy arguments. He refuses to acknowledge that his sports scholarship to USC was a handout just like any other handout. I find myself defending a group I don’t even know. Before the day is over, Manuel is convinced that I am some sort of Communist agent sent into LA to recruit members for the Party.
We eat more and continue to argue before we finally get into stories about Riverbank. His family lived in a tent in our back yard for two years before they had enough to make it on their own. Manuel picked peaches and fought with Okies down at the canal before he became a city slicker. I laugh at him when he tries to come on like a smooth sophisticated cat. He is as much a greaser and small-town kid as I am.
When he finally drives me back to the Belmont, I have a hundred in my pocket. Immediately I throw down fifty for a month’s rent, leaving the rest to carry me until I can round up some kind of gig. Even an artist must eat.
The Revolt Of The Cockroach People, pp 24-28
I read Acosta’s two completed books with a fever. Then I found Oscar “Zeta” Acosta: The uncollected works by Ilan Stavans (Himself a great writer all around – not merely academic – and an interesting character considering his Jewish and Mexican roots. He writes about Mexican and Jewish identity, language, board games, and recently published a graphic novel entitled Mr Spic Goes to Washington) , a published collection of letters and early experiments with writing, including poems (many of which I liked very much) a play, and read that. Stavans’ source for the material was a special collection at the University of California at Santa Barbara, which is accessible to the public. So when I came to be in the Los Angeles area a number of years ago, after driving on from Colorado where I saw the remains of Hunter Thompson shot out of a cannon, I took to visiting USCB to look at the special collection of Oscar Acosta material. His son Marco set it up, gave it to the University some years ago. It includes a lot of original stuff, hand written or typed – letters and writing and etc. I spent five days pouring through all of it and now someone has put portions online here (careful, he did not compress the images on the page). That stuff looks a lot better than what I had photocopied.
In any case, I will not go further down the Zeta hole, let’s call it the Z-Hole, than I need to on here. Many others wrote fitting obituaries and I’m happy to keep my hands out of that pool for now. His life was huge and he is huger still now that he is gone. Below is a video of Oscar reading a chapter from his book Revolt of the Cockroach People which details the rising of the Chicano rights movement in East LA. This particular chapter is concerned with Acosta, in his capacity as a lawyer representing the family of a young Chicano who died in police custody, determining the boy was most likely killed by the sheriff’s department.
Acosta’s devotion and emotional connection to the boy as a fallen brother is plain in the wretching angry sobs he fights while reading his account of the body, but his gravitas remains.
“How many boys tried to get between those legs, now dangling pools of red-black blood?”
Further reading:
Oscar Zeta Acosta: One of God’s own prototypes by E. Rocha
When Zeta met Hunter by Gregg Barrios
After a few technical problems with this player, which is finicky, I think it’s working.
Been listening to Hopkins a lot, got hold of a 5 disc set called Lightnin’ Hopkins – Classic Sides 1946 – 1951, which introduced me to more of his material since the only tunes I heard him sing before were on the Newport Folk Festival ‘59-’68 collection.
His tone reminded me a bit of Peter Greene of Fleetwood Mac, before it went over to Nicks and Buckingham and into popdom. Greene-helmed Mac was one of the greatest blues bands in the universe. B.B. King said of Greene:
He has the sweetest tone I ever heard. He’s the only one who gave me the cold sweats.
Using ABBYY FineReader to scan in some text. Initially got some garbling near the edges of the page but pinning it flat while scanning solved the problem. Works great.
I was drunk so I put the book on crooked. Drunk OCRing! Let's make it a trend.
Right now I am burning a dual layer DVD, filled to the brim. This is something I only do when forced, usually when the space on one of my drives has reached critical mass.
There are two hard drives in my computer, an 80 gigabyte drive which houses all operating system files and other programs and a 120 gigabyte drive used to store all downloads and temporary data (Photoshop and Soundforge scratch files) finished Photoshop / Illustrator work, sound work. Also an 80 gigabyte external drive for music only.
Due to recent acquisitions space on 120 GB drive is fleeting, so I’ve been forced to organize some things and burn to discs. In doing so I’ve gotten a bird’s eye look at my archiving habits and a feel for how my methods for organizing possessions in the physical world contrast with what I do with data, or intangible possessions. Sure, they’re just symbolic, names-in-a-hierarchy lists representing chunks of things representing something else, but I don’t treat them like that. I see them as I do things laying around here – that box filled with magazine clippings, the busted Harmon-Kardon amp my friend gave me in the closet, the transom frame I took down to replace the glass leaning against the wall on the floor…all objects I’ve tacked some purpose to. Not immediate, but somewhere down the road, when I have more time, etc. etc. The difference is only one of tolerance. I do not allow much in my real world to linger around – once things pile up I freak out and start throwing heaps of shit away.
I think an IBM RAMAC 350 is in order for storing my Word documents. And this guy to make sure they STAY FUCKING PUT
Not so digitally – my hard drives are monuments to my inner yearning to grab everything I can and stuff it in a hole. A folder containing images I’ve been meaning to collage into something else. The ROM images of the old Space Ace / Dragon’s Lair arcade games (big!). Old audio files I’ve recorded but not yet played back (gigs and gigs!). Pictures. Lots of pictures. Scans of clipart. FDR’s fireside chats. The Presidents of the United States of America discography. Eight gigs of Ween demos. All shit that, were it represented by pits on plastic or ink on paper or piles of DVDs, would take up tons of space. But I’m given an easy out because stuffing your hard drive with bullshit won’t get the fire department called on your ass when the UPS guy gets crushed under a stack of Tupperware filled with cheap plastic novelties accumulated from years of annual Target sales that falls on him when you open the door to sign for a package. So without these fears my repressed collectivism takes over and shit fills up quick.
I keep all that stuff around and don’t want to delete it, although I know that some of it should go. Worried if I don’t clamp down my hoardish filing on these hard disks habits will seep into my day to day real object organization and then I’ll be doomed and the fire department will eventually have to cut out the wall to get to me, 500 pounds later, trapped between towering stacks of newspapers (or progressing versions of Kindles stacked similarly) and garbage bags of clearance stretch pants from Marshalls. One can always buy a bigger hard drive – and the capacity increases year to year seem almost logarithmic, so more space should always be available – but adding square footage to your fucking house aint as easy.
I definitely am finicky in what I collect if it requires space on my desk, especially with media. I don’t think a music CD needs to be on a CD, necessarily, because the CD doesn’t add anything to the zero’s and one’s that are on it, so it is just wasted space to me. That can take up zero physical space as a series of FLAC files and won’t lose any quality. Compare with vinyl records, however, which are a different story: I will always keep them and never transfer to digital formats because I see no point in the exercise. The record is something you simply can’t duplicate without a record cutter (and and engineer to operate it) and access to primo source material. It contains microscopic grooves representing audio, and the resolution of it is limited only to how quiet and loud a sound the cutter could write to the grooves and the ability of a cartridge / stylus combination to play it. They have proven to me their physical space and weight requirements are worth what they give back. They are unique in nature and I’m comfortable with the trade-off.
Perhaps I make up for my vehement anti-hoarding behavior in life (I’m scared shitless of this compulsion and reorganize and purge possessions a few times a year) by letting loose with .FLACs, .PSDs, .TIFFs and .WAVs? I know the space trade-off is small – a hard drive takes up only around 400 cm³. But can I keep the wall up? Will my few exceptions – vinyl, audio equipment, photographic equipment, original artwork, desks, bike parts, screen printing tools, books – hey, shit, I guess I do collect a lot because those exceptions are not few and there are more I won’t list. Well, I’m a contradiction and a fucking half, aint I?
I saw a Dell commercial a few years ago with a new Devo song playing as soundtrack. Devo has not released any new material since 1990’s Smooth Noodle Maps (although their new album, Fresh, should be out in March) so when I heard Motherbaugh on the vocals singing
Now, watch us work it
Work it out
Watch us work it
Work it inside out
and sounding extremely relevant and in touch, I nearly shit. So here’s the song, which was released as a single and can now be found on vinyl with a few other mixes of the song. It’s absolutely Devo!
I’ve made the site elastic, with a minimum content width of 60 em. Like this in style.css at #rap:
#rap {
max-width:60em;
margin:0 auto;
padding : 0;
width : 90%;
border : 1px solid #aaa;
background : #fff;
overflow: auto;
}
Then the #content needed some tweaks:
#content {
width: 97%;
margin: 5% 1% 0% 1.6%;
text-align: right;
float: left;
background-color: #fff;
padding: 10px 0px;
}
This means that people with huge fucking screens will see the page expand to fit their width until the width reaches 60em; the page will remain static at this point and only the rap margins will grow.
Seems like this elastic method combines some of the best attributes of fixed and fluid CSS page structure.
From Juan on CSSWiz:
Have you noticed that I don’t use “pixel” units when I define font sizes? why? because is of bad practice!. Font sizes should be defined in “em” or “%” units.
Damn right!
When linking I try to avoid self-referential link language (link, click here, go, jump, visit etc) because it seems if the web is to eventually replicate the grace of print, good style and use must be established when employing features of the technology that set it apart. Linking is the foundation of the web, and such an important core element must be thoughtfully employed by taking care with the word or phrase makeup of the link itself.
From W3C:
Good link text should not be overly general; don’t use “click here.” Not only is this phrase device-dependent (it implies a pointing device) it says nothing about what is to be found if the link if followed. Instead of “click here”, link text should indicate the nature of the link target, as in “more information about sea lions” or “text-only version of this page”.
W3C again:
When calling the user to action, use brief but meaningful link text that:
provides some information when read out of context
explains what the link offers
doesn’t talk about mechanics
is not a verb phrase
Further reading:
“Death to “click-here”! by CSS-Wiz (first page I read on this topic)
Don’t use “click here” as link text by World Wide Web Consortium
Last day has been eating, drinking, sleeping Wordpress code. Added menubar at top, very pleased. Had problems with margins in the #content area but figured it out. Problems with hiding sidebar, ended up just commenting it out of the sidebar.php and that seems to work ok. Should probably delete it.
My caption CSS was not providing correct padding so I lifted the caption CSS code from the OneRoom Wordpress theme – it looks like a really well thought out design, check it out.
Now I need to wrangle to text size to a good place. What the hell is an EM? From Bigbaer.com CSS tutorials:
So what exactly is an em? The em unit traces its origin to the em box as used in print typography. The actual spatial rendering of an em is dependent on the glyphs of the font used. As such there is naturally a great deal of variance. The “1 em” spatial representation of an upper case letter X of the Courier font will be decidedly different from the rendering of the same upper case letter X of the Verdana font.
Though at first thought it may seem confusing it is not. An “em” unit or “1 em” displays at the default or “base” size for a rendered font glyph as contained within an HTML element where the default display is assigned by the user agent. Generally speaking, text styled with a font-size 1 em {font-size: 1em;} will display as if no size declarations were assigned. Font-size “1 em” headers, sub-headers, paragraphs and other user-agent display controlled elements will all render at the default user-agent-determined settings.
Some designers feel the “default font-size” assigned by user-agents is too large. Declaring a smaller than “1 em” font-size for body text is a simple thing. A popular “em-size” for body text (used here!) is {font-size: 0.8em;} which generally renders as the equivalent of 11px (11 pixels).
In conclusion, pixel (.px) sized fonts offer reliable control and consistant scaling across devices. A 12px font size will always retain the same relative scale to a 16px font when displayed on the same device and active resolution. The em unit scales consistantly as well and has the added advantage of allowing the end-user to adjust the text size through settings available on a particular user agent
New image caption test:
"I set my pen / To writing you / But it drifted off the page"
OK – I’m really starting to see the light here. The nested, hierarchical nature of CSS is really intuitive and great when you get the hang of it. Especially for text display. If I define the font-family I want the whole page to use in body and everything else looks good I can leave it alone. If an element is noticed, however, which looks weird with that font, I can change only that element and leave the rest of the page as whatever font I picked first.
Setting text size in percent, relative to the body, is also great, because you then need only change one font size, and the whole page text – links, headers, etc – change relative to the body. Could be called the “master size”. Let’s use this to test also the difference between PRE and CODE tags to display code.
CODE:
body {
margin : 0;
padding : 0;
background : #eee;
color : #111;
font-size: 1.1em;
font-weight: normal;
font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', Garamond, Geneva, Lucida, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}
PRE:
body {
margin : 0;
padding : 0;
background : #eee;
color : #111;
font-size: 1.1em;
font-weight: normal;
font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', Garamond, Geneva, Lucida, Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif;
}
Are we all learning something? The PRE and CODE tags are styled in the Wordpress style.css with just about everything else. I like the blue code on grey look for the PRE box, reminds me of easier read IBM terminals with no hard disks and two floppy drives at grade school. Let’s make the border fucking DASHED, sweet!
The code I’m using for PRE is:
pre {border: dashed 1px blue;
font-size: 1.3 em;
color: blue;
margin: 10px;
padding:10px;
background: #EFEFED}
Today is a fine Saturday morning because I have no obligation today to anyone, save myself, and breaking your own promises is a lot easier to deal with than breaking ones made to others. Still around 35° but the radiators are pumping up in he-ah’ and it is a comfortable environment.
Did you know that in Windows you can insert a degree (°) symbol by holding “Alt” and typing “0176″ then release “Alt”? Try it – there are a bunch of sweet symbols you can materialize using different combinations. This American Life is on in the background, and its constant rotation of the same music is starting to really bother me and getting a bit out of hand considering their resources. The show has enough cash that they could purchase some more music rights, or they could hire an audio engineer / artist to create music for them – right? My awareness of this has begun to intrude upon my appreciation for the otherwise fine reporting and production.
I am editing a post on Oscar Acosta and find myself getting into the territory of Gonzo journalism origins, and who really created it? kinds of things – which is fine. But looking for quotes from Acosta’s and Thompson’s books and obituary of Acosta, I find that very little raw text from either author exists in complete form on the Internet. Ridiculous, I just want to quote the motherfuckers. So I think I will have to transcribe it by hand from my book copies or scan some in and use OCR. Which leads me to – I don’t use Optical Text Recognition for anything. I remember employing the technology once, to replicate a resume which only existed as a hard copy and the algorithms were built into the manufacturer’s scanning software. It worked fine mostly and only mangled a few characters.
So looking around I see Abby FineReader, the M1 Abrams Tank with The Incredible Hulk driving it of OCR software, which is marketed to people who spend a lot of time scanning in nothing but text, but also to those who want to find and record text in photgraphs (street signs, logos, pieces of paper on the table if the photo’s resolution cooperates). This could open up some pictures to further study, especially if such found information alters the context of the picture.
It seems that those interested in using OCR for character recognition in photgraphs may also be interested in catalogeing other parts of the image. The wheels are turning, surely, on the development of software that can see objects (OOR? copyright THAT!): very interesting to see a picture of children playing on the street in a whitewashed 50’s Americana suburb, on a cul-de-sac, parents surrounding and hovering, participating, with a list of objects under it, generated on-the-fly. I can see it now: fire hydrant; street sign; (crosswalk; school); grass; sidewalk; cumulus cloud formation; laughter; children etc etc. And depending on how advanced the code gets, maybe mother; subordinate; love; happiness; abandon; daytime; peer group 8-12 yrs. old etc.
Like this: suit; cigar; airplane; striped shirt; leaf print tie; fat prick; lonely piece of shit
Consider also this type of software, if the development pushed in that direction, could be altered to handle CAPTCHAs, but I digress.
Here at RMCQUAIL, as this site shall henceforth be known, the mood is better when good music fills the air. So occasionally I will be posting a song which is of some significance to me; these posts will be filed under the “singles” category.
If at any time you would like to see all Singles posted, just use the menu up top to select “Topics > Audio > Singles” and they will all appear.
So let’s get to it and test the limits of fair use in US copyright law! Hey, it’s fun writing for an audience that isn’t there. Someday!
It is a lightweight, nice looking Flash based audio player for browsers, and I will be using it to pipe some things through on this site. Shittzzah!
OK, lots of content coming. I am a machine gun of good fortune and you’ll love me for it. I’ve been taking pictures of Things I’ve Been Doing. Not too interesting yet, mostly just bike work and varnishing. But once this motherfucker starts turning ain’t nobody gonna bring it down. I think part of the reason for me starting a long term blog /online journal may be a reaction to all of the hyper-annotation I’ve been doing with Twitter and Facebook updates. I wanted to give social networking a try and try educating people about what I’ve been up to, but that shit trained me to be ultra concise when perhaps a bit more exposition or gerrymandering is necessary. You can’t have fun writing on Twitter. It is perhaps entertaining, if you like words and grammer for the puzzled nature of them, to see which verbs or prepositions can be eliminated: to bring the character count down without totally leveling the foundation of the sentence. Novelty – nothing wrong with novelty, but writing is not novelty and I’ve been missing it, missing long sentences and abbreviated phrases and rumination about things which have no purpose, like if there are any Thylacines tromping around Tazmania and if so, can they really open their jaws that wide?
I’ve been obsessing over moving the contents of the fucking sidebar to the right of this text over to the top of the page, as part of the header. Failing that just eliminating it. For what I want it makes no sense to chop off however many pixels it takes from the content width. But I will work on that until I figure it out so it is no reason to hold off posting to this fucking thing.
Tonight was busy, though – put a new cog on the rear bike wheel (and removed one without a chainwhip), so discovering a new favorite gear ratio. Sanded an unmachined wheel rim to both file down the wheel joint and prevent the most horrible screeching I’ve ever heard while braking (long story short 100 grit sandpaper a few times, thoroughly, across both sidewalls until smooth to the touch – no more screeching and better stopping due to the pitting) – so adding this bullshit with the sidebar, researching PHP and diving into the inner workings of the Wordpress Classic theme and back into coding (I was never good with programming) – the time gets eaten, and I have four fucking posts sitting in the draft folder, unfinished. But I am working on them.
I set a lot of goals for after work, and if I wrap everything up before 10pm the night is a kind one. Tonight things went smoothly, with the bike and the work table varnish application (5th coat?). But if things go South – and South has been a favorite fucking direction for my activities to head of late – I’m up until 2:30 sometimes doing things I can’t put off until the next day, like cleaning up grease or paint/stain brushes or fixing my bike so the wheels won’t fall off if I hit a pothole.
There are a lot of things I’m trying to do at once so the best scenario I can hope for is one that sees me finishing these things that only need to be done once, and then settling into a less stressful, more leisurely routine.
Robin: “Boy! That was our closest call ever! I have to admit that I was pretty scared!”
Batman: “I wasn’t scared in the least.”
Robin: “Not at all?”
Batman: “Haven’t you noticed how we always escape the vicious ensnarements of our enemies?”
Robin: “Yeah, because we’re smarter than they are!”
Batman: “I like to think it’s because our hearts are pure.”
Here’s a picture of Debbie Harry
Holy shit.
I’m sitting on a fuckton of ideas for posts here. But I also went and saw Gene Ween at Lincoln Hall yesterday, and Sound Forge 10 keeps crashing when I try to do anything with the Audio Restoration or Clipped Peak Reduction plugins. Can’t figure out why so going back to Forge 9.
The people attending the Gene Ween performance were predictably, positively boognishtik, and as such much incidental crowd noise was recorded. It think this is a good excuse to learn more about mastering, because the crowd noise resides at a totally different level of the audio spectrum – much lower in frequency – and thus more easily isolated and removed (in theory) with the mastering process. I am a fucking amateur with a capital fucking AYE when it comes to this shit, editing audio or what have you – the most I usually do is try to round over any clipped peaks and perhaps normalize a bit. But I’ve just discovered the pencil tool and it is like audio editing crack and I keep wanting to smoke it. Anyway, good time to jump into frequency theory and that stuff, gotta learn sometime yeah?
OK – people want to hard limit their recordings to -6dB – isn’t that kinda quiet, eh? -2 sounds better!
This is referred to as premastering, actually.
Reading this guide, gotta read it, wrap my brain around the theory, 64 pages, aint nothing! Anyone who wants to learn about proper recording should read this guide:
So let’s see if I can make it sound better.
Also I think the sidebar, so ubiquitous on Wordpress themes, needs to go. At least moved to the top. Why take up valuable horizontal space all the way down the document? Can I have the content wrap around and under the sidebar? No? Why? Fuck, fuck. Reading this here for information on how the sidebar works, maybe I can bend it into placement at the top.
Oh man, just found audio analytic gold in the form of Sonic Visualizer. It’s aim, according to the developer:
Sonic Visualiser is an application for viewing and analyzing the contents of music audio files. The aim of [the program] is to be the first…you reach for when want to study a musical recording rather than simply listen to it…we hope Sonic Visualiser will be of particular interest to musicologists, archivists, signal-processing researchers and anyone else looking for a friendly way to take a look at what lies inside the audio file.
I think this will become my go to program for posting visual representations of audio data. Spectograms etc.
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