Posted on
by

JBuds Frames Wireless Audio for your Glasses

I am an owner of many many pairs of headphones.  Bluetooth, wired, bone conduction, over-ear, studio reference, open-back, light-weight, waterproof, you name it, I have probably got it.  I’m not really a major audiophile, I don’t spend absurd amounts of money on fancy equipment, but I listen to music nearly non-stop when I’m not doing other things.

I’ve always been an avid music consumer and have lived with glasses on my face and a pair of headphones around my neck since I got my first Walkman back in the 80’s.  I say all of this to highlight the fact that it takes a lot for me to be surprised or impressed by a pair of headphones but here I am.

Over the last year or two I have become a big fan of open-ear listening options so I can hear the world around me while listening to music.  Just because I am currently playing “Those Crimson Tears” by Ed Harcourt doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be approachable in a conversation or, if I’m walking/biking/jogging, able to hear the sounds of automobiles in the vicinity.  My introduction to the wonder of open-ear listening was a cheap pair of bone conduction phones I picked up a couple of years ago.  If you’re not familiar, BC devices, here’s a picture of the Vidonn F1.  As you can see, they loop behind your head and over your ears but don’t actually cover your ear canals.  Instead, two audio drivers rest on the sides of you head just in front of your ears and transmit audio by sending the audio vibrations into your skull, which, your ears are quite able to hear.  It works surprisingly well and once I started using these, I found earbuds and other options to be fairly unappealing because I was constantly needing to take them out to be able to talk/hear/interact with the world.  With the BC headset I was able to keep listening while in a check-out line without even pausing while still being fully engaged in the interaction.

I found that I was gravitating more and more to my BC phones despite the other available options.  And then I heard about another option for open-ear listening: Bose BT sunglasses.  What?

As a glasses wearer, the idea that my glasses could ALSO be my open-ear music player seemed too good to be true.  There were two problems.  Problem #1: the Bose sunglasses were stupid expensive at $250.  Problem #2: I wear prescription glasses all the time and I have multiple pairs as well as prescription sunglasses.  I would need lots of Bose frames to replace all my glasses situations.

Enter JLab Frames.

JLab JBuds Frames Wireless Audio for Your Glasses Black EBFRAMESRBLK124 - Best Buy

JLab Frames are open-ear audio devices that clip on to your existing glasses, be they sunglasses or prescription daily wear.  They are Bluetooth, a little clunky but not terrible looking, and they only cost $49, so they definitely don’t break the bank.  As soon as I saw them I had to give them a try so I ordered a pair a couple of weeks back and I’m here to report on my experience.

I bought my Frames directly from JLab.  The shipping was fast and free and JLab threw in a pair of wired earbuds for free.  Not sure why, but, hey, some more earbuds.  Nice.

The Frames come in a black storage bag with a magnetic USB-A type charging cable.  If I had only a C-type port on my computer, I might be annoyed but this was perfectly fine.  After an initial charge I powered them up and the pairing process was quick and painless.  Didn’t even need to read a manual.

The JLab JBuds Frames are open-ear headphones you clip to your glasses - The Verge

I put on some music and started listening.  Fairly quickly I found that the volumes are more than sufficient for my listening and the sound is brighter and more enjoyable than with the bone conduction option, although they are not super loud and there is not a lot of bass presence.  There is a bass-boost mode that helps a bit but if I was after booming bass I would be disappointed.

The controls are easy enough to manage with the ability to play/pause, adjust volume, change the EQ options, and answer/hang-up phone calls.  These are astonishingly good in terms of voice quality on phone calls and people have been telling me so on almost every call.  If anything, the mics are too sensitive as I’ve been asked to mute because of sounds happening in the next room that were picked up by the Frames.

It’s really easy to forget I’m even wearing them.  The rubber grips do touch the side of my head, but it’s forgettable and doesn’t feel any worse than the occasional contact between my head and the arms of my glasses.  Switching them between different pairs of glasses (when I put on sunglasses while driving, for example) is fairly trivial and only takes a few seconds.

In terms of battery life, I have found that I use them so much more than I have ever used any other headphones throughout the day that I routinely hit the 8-hour battery life limit and have to move them to a charger and go back to bone conduction or some other option.  This doesn’t usually happen until the evening, but it has me contemplating the purchase or a second pair.

Overall, I would wish for a little more battery life and perhaps a few additional EQ profiles built in, but other than that I have absolutely no complaints.  The JLab Frames are my new default daily driver for music consumption, taking meetings from my phone, and everything else I listen to throughout the day.  There is no ear fatigue, voice audio quality is fantastic, they’re comfortable for a longtime glasses wearer, general sound quality is nothing to write home about but is quite listenable and enjoyable, and the price point is pretty damn reasonable.  Also, you get to hear the world around you, which is really addictive.

Strongly recommend.

Posted on
by

At the risk of overgeneralizing, there are two major categories of technologies in the world: special purpose and general purpose. Would it help to have an illustration? OK. A typewriter is a special purpose machine that does one thing and one thing only; it puts words on paper. In contrast, a computer is a general-purpose machine that does many things including, but not limited to, putting words on paper. There are countless examples I could cite. The filet knife, special purpose. The Swiss army knife, general purpose. The digital SLR camera, special purpose. The smart phone, general purpose pocket computer that also has one or more cameras. It is often, though not always, the case that a special purpose tool will be better at accomplishing a task than its general purpose alternative. If one wishes to filet a fish, a dedicated filet knife will be infinitely better for the task than a Swiss army knife (no offense to the Swiss army).

There is not much point in trying to debate whether a smartphone is a better music player than an iPod or a better camera than a Nikon or a better GPS than OnStar. As a general purpose device that can do all of those things as well as I need, the vast majority of the time, my smartphone is like the Swiss army knife: always in my pocket and able to be anything from an encyclopedia to a bubble level if I need it to be. There are so many benefits to the all-in-one, general purpose, device that it hardly needs pointing out. Why, then, do single purpose devices still exist? Why, if Internet advertising is to be believed, is there a movement towards special purpose technologies such as tape players, turntables, film cameras, and other seemingly dead platforms? It’s not nostalgia. The kids who are buying cassette tapes and Walkmans today didn’t grow up with these technologies. They didn’t have vinyl records. Yet there is a resurgence in interest in “retro” and “vintage” technology and I suspect that the reason is quite simple; people are drawn to the experience of focus.

Focus, flow state, distraction free, whatever you wish to call it, even in (maybe especially in) today’s digitally mediated and hyper connected world, has its timeless appeal. While you certainly can sit down with a laptop and a copy of GarageBand and make a song, there’s a good chance that you will start with that intention and wind up on Reddit reading about cats. In contrast, if you pick up a guitar and try to write a song, there is a 0% chance of the guitar popping up a notification or showing you a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head. Flow, or focus, is simply easier to achieve with a technology/tool that is not connected to other people/places/things that are not related to the thing that you are trying to accomplish.

If you listen to a new album on a streaming service you may be simultaneously on social media or taking pictures of your pets or texting with your sister and while you are certainly able to honestly say that you listened to the record, you did so with only a portion of your attention. What if, instead, you took a record out of the sleeve, set it on a turntable, and listened to it with your full attention, perhaps spending some time looking at the jacket and liner notes while it played, without also playing Angry Birds or tweeting about it? This is an entirely different experience.

If you were to take a film camera or even a digital SLR out for a day of photography, you would be focused on photography in a different way than if you saw something, pulled out your phone, and took a quick picture. Certainly both tools can take photos, but only one keeps your focus on the goal of taking pictures.

This is a realization that has hit me fairly hard over the last few years. I have found myself pondering the seeming contradiction between my having access to the most capable technology I have ever had and my struggles to put the tools to creative uses. My computers are incredibly powerful writing machines but I find writing with them to be very difficult because my mind goes all over the place. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the digital audio tools I have at my disposal and my ability to write and record music as well. I have found myself buying vinyl records again as a way to experience new music because I find that streaming makes it more difficult to deeply engage with the music. What I’m saying, and maybe it’s just me, is that I’ve started to prioritize the experience of single tasking, of focus, of disconnection, over the convenience of general purpose devices. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Perhaps I take it a little farther than some. I have started using typewriters and fountain pens for focused writing. I have moved to a dedicated music player for listening to my digital music library on the go even though my phone is a very good device for audio. I have acquired and rehabbed a few pre-Internet computers with ancient word processors installed to use and editing revising text for online publication even though it’s technically more complicated to move those files to a modern computer to publish them. I have even bought a dedicated multitrack recording machine to use in my recording studio despite the presence of a very powerful and full featured Mac sitting right there on the desk. In every case I am looking for a tool that allows me to focus on what I am doing without any distractions or the temptation to multitask. I find this mildly ironic since I am somebody who has a healthy dislike of nostalgia and I work in technology and have chased after more powerful convergence technology for most of my adult life. I was one of the first people I know who had an iPhone, I have carried a laptop with me for over 20 years, I built my first digital audio workstation in the 1990s. I am no Luddite. The idea that I would be writing this blog entry on a 60-year-old typewriter would have seemed like insanity to me 15 years ago. And yet, here I am, banging out a blog post on a machine that was built before The Beatles were a thing, despite the iPad Pro sitting on the table next to me, the iMac in the studio, the two Windows laptops in the living room, and the smart phone in my pocket. When I am happy with what I have written I will grab my laptop or phone and read these words out loud and they will be transformed into text by dictation software and I will spell check and revise and then I will post online. Or I might just re-type this using one of my old computers and then transfer the resulting file to a newer machine to post. It’s a lot of work to go through just to write a blog post, but it is work I am willing to do just so I can stay focused long enough to write something I want to write.

I know that I am not typical, but I also know that I am not alone in deciding that this is a more enjoyable and productive way to work. There are authors who work this way. Barack Obama, in his recent autobiography, admitted that he writes his books in longhand on yellow legal paper. George RR Martin writes all of his books on an ancient PC that has no Internet access. Both of those writers have access to all the latest technology, but they still opt for the “obsolete” tech to do focused work. Many, if not most, musicians use good old-fashioned guitars and paper notebooks to write their songs despite the powerful digital music tools at their disposal. Even amongst those who make electronic music, there is a preference for analog synthesizers with their knobs and switches over the myriad of digital software synths that are available. I think it boils down to focus, to a preference for special purpose tools with their inherent limitations and tactile, multi-sensory, experiences.

I readily admit that this philosophy isn’t for everyone. Acquiring, learning to use, and maintaining special purpose tools is (or can be) more expensive since many of the technologies I have mentioned are no longer manufactured and can be difficult to find or fix. There are cheap typewriters on the shelves of thrift stores all over the place, but they are rarely in a condition to be put to immediate use without also learning how to clean, lubricate, and repair them. Old computers are even harder to find and fix and the cost of buying a rehabbed and ready machine is usually pretty steep. Vintage tech often has a collector’s market associated with it and that often means that a cool analog synth that formerly sold for $100 or so will now go for several thousand dollars on eBay. For a lot of people, the all-in-one general purpose tool is all they can afford. I think that’s a real loss.

Tools that improve focus or bring you closer to the experience of creating something were formerly the primary options for making things. If you wanted to write you got a writing tool, if you wanted to make music you got a musical instrument, if you wanted to read you bought a book, if you wanted to listen to music you bought a turn table or a tape player or a CD player and you used each of these technologies exclusively and with intentionality. Then along came computers and smartphones, the market dried up and the dedicated tools were shunted aside and became “vintage” and “retro” and “obsolete”. Just like in the movies, where special effects became primarily the domain of CGI, the old ways became impractical and cost prohibitive. But, movie makers and moviegoers have recently begun to have a renewed appreciation for real life “practical” effects and I hope the same holds true for other analog technologies. A mix tape will always be more real more personal and more meaningful than an online playlist. A physical piece of paper with your words, perhaps handwritten, will always be more real than a Word file or an email. Atoms will always be more immersive than bits, and I like to think that the generation that has been raised with digital devices is starting to discover that the “old ways” still have that one advantage of being focused and visceral in a way that cannot be replicated by a processor and a screen.

Don’t take this as me saying that we should all chuck our technology and go back to carrier pigeons. The ability to share words, sounds, photos, and videos with the rest of the world is one of the great joys of the 21st century. The ability to use the devices we are all carrying around to take pictures and interact with distant friends and navigate in places we have never been before is something I wouldn’t trade for anything. But if you find that you struggle to focus while using these powerful devices, try the analog special purpose equivalent, or at least a digital special purpose one. Try using tools that are only good for the thing that you are trying to do, tools that don’t track or distract or tempt you, tools where there are no rabbit holes to get lost in. See how the experience changes. You might like it.

Posted on
by

The first computer program I ever wrote was in BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20. I was in second grade.

Many years and many programs later, I have now worked in software engineering for over 25 years (going on 27, actually) but I don’t code much anymore. Years ago I moved into “leadership” positions. Architect, team lead, technical director, and finally just plain director, which is a purely managerial position which I have held for over five years. I haven’t committed any code to any production software since I moved into that role. Admittedly, my days of regular heads down coding had been long gone before I completely moved into leadership, but it was initially a bit of a shock to no longer have even a small amount of coding in my day to day job.

The teams I lead today work in technology that I have never even worked in as a programmer. I am quite familiar with the core languages (HTML and JavaScript) but I have never been a full-time software developer working in the particular mix of technologies and architectures that my teams work in. Sometimes I miss coding.

Here’s the thing though… When I think about coding I usually realize pretty quickly that there isn’t anything in particular that I actually want to create. It’s like being in the mood to cook but not being hungry. You’re not going to dig in the pantry for no good reason.

The modern internet and mobile application landscape and the current set of technologies used in the standard technology of our phones, laptops, and smart devices is certainly powerful and, one would think it would tempt me to spend some of my spare time playing around with the latest and greatest, but I kinda hate it all. I don’t hate it because it’s new, I hate it because it’s boring to me. It’s too powerful, too easy. The latest and greatest is too much a part of my daily life and my day job, even if I’m not actually doing any coding myself these days. The idea of building a modern React application on a modern stack (Mongo, Express, etc) just bores me to tears. I want something more challenging and pointless.

There are actually programming languages that exist for the sole purpose of being challenging and pointless. One is called brainfuck and it’s entire purpose to destroy your mind while you attempt to create code that hurts to read. According to Wikipedia The code to print “Hello world!” on the screen in brainfuck is as follows:

++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>>.>—.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.——.——–.>>+.>++.

If I mistyped anything and got that wrong I don’t care. I have no interest in anything QUITE that pointless and challenging, but I don’t want to do any boring modern development either. What is a poor boy to do?

I think I know. Retro programming, writing new code for the old and obsolete.

It is with this in mind that I have decided to start learning how to code C++ applications for Apple Macintosh 68k machines (generally, pre-1995) and not just for fun, I actually have an application in mind that I wish existed on for my old Macs so I have decided to learn to code for these machines and write it.

The program I have in mind is a WYSIWYG Markdown editor based on the user interface of Microsoft Word 5.1a, the best word processing program ever written. And it won’t just edit Markdown, this app will also be able to post to WordPress.

Markdown and WordPress are things that didn’t exist in the mid-90’s and there are no MD editors for machines this old. What’s more, web interfaces for blogging tools like WordPress require https capabilities that don’t exist on these older machines and therefore make communication generally impossible. There is no financial or market incentive to write software with either of these features, but as a purely intellectual exercise for my own amusement? Well, that’s another matter.

So, tonight I started in on learning C++ on the Macintosh with an old copy of the CodeWarrior IDE and (probably because of the sheer silliness of the whole pursuit) I had a good time. It was actually fun. I think I’ll call it Marker “5.1” as an homage to the Parker “51” fountain pen, Markdown, and Word 5.1. This ought to actually be a good time.

Posted on
by
1933 Klein-Adler 2

Yesterday I drove to an estate sale in southeastern Minnesota and purchased a 1933 Klein-Adler 2 typewriter.  I am not even sure how many typewriters I now have in my possession.  This year of our lord 2020 has turned into “the year Ryan started collecting old typewriters”.  I blame the pandemic.  Why not?

It started innocently enough.  I had a lot of pandemic downtime on my hands and when I have idle time I tend to write.  I write almost every day.  I type, I scrawl, I scribble.  Pens, computers, typewriters, I use them all.  I seem to have a non-stop need to be saying things and when there isn’t anybody there to say them to, I write them down. 

I’m writing this blog post on a computer; modern laptop with modern software on the modern internet.  Nothing particularly unusual there, right?  I have learned, however, that I don’t like modern computers for certain types of writing.  I can’t write a poem on a computer, for example.  I’ve tried.  I can only seem to do that with a pen on paper.  More insidiously, modern computers contain within themselves too many distractions and temptations for me.  The temptation to hop online and look something up and then spend the next three hours on social media or reading Wikipedia articles or stupid viral listicles instead of writing is ever present.  Even if you avoid these grosser temptations and actually do some writing, the ways in which modern computers enable real-time editing, spell-checking, auto-complete, word suggestions, and grammar correction change the nature of the writing process.  On a modern computer you can just kinda spew out whatever is on the top of your head, revise it as you go so that it has just enough polish to be dangerous, and click publish to share your work with the world.

It’s powerful, but I find that it leads to a shallower, less thoughtful and deliberate, writing process.  I have revised this post extensively as I have written it, second guessing myself, wiping out whole sentences with a click.  Last week I read the new Obama book, “A Promised Land”, and he expressed how I feel about word processing fairly well when he explained his decision to write his book in longhand on yellow legal pads by saying, “I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness”.

The “mask of tidiness” covering “half-baked thoughts” may be fine for a blog post, a tweet, or some other ephemeral bit of word salad, but when I really want to Write this is not what I’m looking for.  I’m looking for a process that will force me to really be present for what I’m doing.  I have yet to discover any better way to do this than to use a typewriter. 

Remington Quiet-Riter

This is something I have known for a very long time.  I bought my first typewriter (a lovely 1950’s Remington Quiet-Riter https://www.antikeychop.com/remington-quiet-riter-typewriter) in fifth grade when I was convinced that I wanted to grow up to be H. G. Wells and decided to write my first of many unpublished/uncompleted novels “The Second Men In The Moon”.  My parents gifted me a more modern, electrified, machine in middle school, a Smith-Corona SL500 (https://typewriterdatabase.com/Smith+Corona.SL+500.86.bmys) and I used it through high school as I wrote such unreadable classics as “The Palace of Conservative Haircuts”.  I didn’t even know about word processors until I was introduced to the Macintosh during my sophomore year in high school in a creative writing class.  I had only used computers for programming and video games, I never thought about computers as being useful for writing. 

Smith-Corona SL500

After high school I attended CDI Computer Academy and embarked on a career in software development that would span the public explosion of the internet, the invention of smart phones, and all of the other high tech innovations of the last 25+ years.  In that first year at CDI, I had a class in which I learned typing and another in which I learned to use the old DOS word processor WordPerfect.  I moved on from typewriters, viewing them as obsolete.  I don’t even know what became of my Smith-Corona SL500.  Probably a Goodwill donation or a trade in at a pawn shop for a few bucks.

Olivetti Lettera 36, aka: “The Gateway Drug” (image from MassMadeSoul.com)

This changed about eight or nine years ago when I encountered a little electric typewriter at a thrift shop that was just, well, COOL.  It was an Olivetti Lettera 36 (https://www.massmadesoul.com/olivetti-lettera-36).  I knew nothing about Olivetti, I knew nothing about their history of iconic industrial design, heck I knew almost nothing about typewriters, but the thing was just so damn COOOOOOOL and it was, like, ten bucks or something, so I brought it home.  I found out pretty quickly that I missed typewriters.  After years and years of writing on computers, the typewriter felt so radically different that it made me think differently as I wrote.  A word processor and a typewriter both end up giving you words at the end of the day but the process is just so different, it was like playing an acoustic guitar instead of an electric guitar: the thing written would be shaped by the tool used to write it.

The typewriter certainly seemed to promote more creative writing and I fairly quickly put the little Olivetti to use in my recording studio as part of my songwriting process.  When I write songs it’s usually something like this.  I get a melody and maybe one or two lines in my head.  I start listening to that part of the song and wait for my brain to fill in the rest.  Then I go grab something to preserve whatever little song seed I’m jamming on.  I will sing into a tape recorder or voice recorder app if I have to, or I will scribble down some lyrics on a sheet of paper.  Later on I will get in front of a keyboard or pick up a guitar and work out the song.  I will expand and revise the lyrics and write down the chords once I discover what they are.  The resulting song sheets are messy with lines crossed out, chords written in the margins, and sometimes whole verses and choruses in the wrong order or in totally different notebooks from each other.  Fun, but not easy to work off of when you want to, oh, say, record the song.

Now, I could put all of that mess into the computer, and I usually did, but I would always find myself wanting a printed paper copy to scribble notes on, reference, and play along with.  I forget my own chords and lyrics, especially when a song is still new to me.  I just needed one hard copy that didn’t look like the ravings of a lunatic.  The problem was that ink jet printers SUCK almost as much as my handwriting.  Seemingly every damn time I would try to print up a hard copy, the ink would be unreliable, nozzles dirty, whatever.  If you don’t print with an ink jet every day they are basically useless.  I didn’t have a laser printer with the nice dry non-shitty toner.  So, instead of working on my song I would wrestle with the printer for 20 minutes cleaning nozzles and then give up and go eat a bag of Doritos and be sad.

The typewriter solved this.  I could just turn it on, grab a sheet of paper, and type up my song.  Woot!  I was so happy with this minor miracle of convenience that I started eyeballing other typewriters at other thrift stores but I was faithful to my little Olivetti until one day when it died on me and I couldn’t make it work anymore.  Crapsticks.

Underwood #5

I wound up with a rather unexpected next typewriter, an Underwood #5 (http://www.thisisdrivel.com/typewriters/UnderwoodNo5/UnderwoodNo5.html), a machine that was probably the most common typewriter in the world prior to the mid-1920’s.  You cannot get much further from a Lettera 36 than an Underwood #5.  The thing weighs about the same as a Toyota Camry and has an equivalent amount of sex appeal.  It brings to mind adjectives such as “workmanlike”, “sturdy” and “reliable”.  Ain’t nobody slinging an Underwood #5 in their carry-on for a bit of late night writing during a weekend jaunt.

But it was functional and charming in it’s own way and I lugged the damn thing home.  After a while I partially disassembled it with the idea of turning it into a USB Typewriter (https://www.usbtypewriter.com) but I never completed the conversion.  The fact that it wasn’t working, however, did lead me to snag another machine at yet another thrift store. 

Smith-Corona “Corona Seventy”

This next typewriter was another electric from the 70’s, a Smith-Corona “Corona Seventy” (https://typewriterdatabase.com/1970-smith-corona-clipper-seventy-deluxe.3324.typewriter).  Like the Lettera 36 before it, the Seventy had a kinda cool design, was portable, and was a lot of fun to pound away on.  Also like the Seventy before it, it started experiencing minor malfunctions of the aging electric components.  This whole “old electric typewriter” thing was proving to be fairly unreliable, so, I looked for something old and cool but mechanical, no electricity.  I figured that would be less trouble.  Eventually I found a 1965 Royal Aristocrat (https://typewriterdatabase.com/1965-royal-aristocrat.13819.typewriter) and pretty much fell in love.  The Royal looked good, typed well enough, and was always reliable when I needed it.  It was portable and did everything I asked of it.  For a few years it was “my typewriter”.  But then 2020 happened.

1965 Royal Aristocrat

This year I started doing so much writing that the limitations of the Aristocrat started nagging at me, just as the irritations of trying to write on a modern computer did.  I fought with the Royal a bit more than I would have liked and started combing online auction sites, online thrift stores, Craigslist listings, and online estate sales with an eye towards finding The Perfect Typewriter.  Things went, um…  a little off the rails.

First I did research.  I watch the documentary California Typewriter.  I read blogs.  I searched for “best typewriter for writers”.  I found many opinions and much interesting information.  I started to notice that usually when the appearance of a typewriter caught my eye it was an Olivetti.  They had style.  I also noticed that most people seemed to agree that the three most “writerly” typewriters of all time were the Olympia SM-7, the Hermes 3000, and the Olivetti Lettera 32.  The internet was full of loving posts by diehard aficionados singing the praises of the three machines.  I also learned that many typewriters are essentially Lettera 32 machines with different bodies, including what is probably the most eye-catching typewriter of them all, the Olivetti Valentine.

My 1969 Olivetti Valentine

There was a pandemic on.  I was in a bad mood.  I was scared, figured that if I got COVID, with my history of chronic lung issues, I was a goner.  So, I splurged and picked up a Valentine.  It was not a thrift store special.  This thing cost a couple hundred bucks but when I saw it and used it for the first time I was bitten by the typewriter bug HARD.  We’re talking WELTS.  The resulting infection caused me to experiment with all sorts of typewriters.  All year I’ve been haunting estate sales and auctions, grabbing any unloved and unwanted Olympia, Olivetti, Smith-Corona, Adler, Remington, Silver-Reed, or Underwood that happened to strike my fancy.  I’ve learning basic typewriter restoration skills and bestowed a few machines on others who were typewriter-curious.  I have a pretty solid little collection at this point.  Art deco machines from the 30’s and 40’s, East German behemoths and Swiss beauties from the 50’s, compact and swift Italian and Japanese machines from the 60’s and 70’s, I’ve got a machine for every mood and every whim.  It’s a fun little collection and not exactly a bank breaker, since so many people consider the typewriter to be quite obsolete.

I’ve found that if I keep my eyes open, there are excellent, high quality, solid, beautifully engineered machines available all over the place for around the price of a couple stops by Super World Buffet (yes, I measure monetary expenditures in Chinese buffet visits, don’t judge me) and usually they just need paper, a ribbon, and maybe a little light lubrication and cleaning. 

This 1956 Olivetti Lettera 22 was purchased off Craigslist for $30 from the original owner in mint condition with a case.

It’s fun to have a new hobby and each time I take one of these little machines out for a bout of writing, I find myself inspired in a way I rarely am with a computer.  What will I type with today?  I don’t know, but I’m sure it will be a rewarding experience.

Edit: I went with the 1958 Smith-Corona Silent-Super.

Silent, super, writing bliss.

Posted on
by
“If it has to be jailbroken and side-loaded in order to run approved code, and then disposed of when it’s reached it’s pRE-determined end of life, what you’ve got there isn’t a computer, that’s a Smart Device.”

When Steve Jobs debuted the original iPhone it was clearly a very small computer.  There was a CPU, a screen, memory, input, output.  Almost every device we use these days, from televisions to watches to vacuum cleaners, is some sort of computer.  I have smart light bulbs that are technically computers.  I say this because I want to make a distinction between a Personal Computer (PC) and a Smart Device (SD).

A Smart Device is a computer by any technical definition, but there are some things that differentiate a SD from a PC, mainly based on how the technology is intended to be used and maintained by the purchaser. To illustrate the differences, I will compare and contrast my television, my phone, and my laptop.

My television is an LG Smart TV.  It has apps and an app store and it has some sort of operating system on it that is referred to as “firmware”.  Maybe it’s Android, maybe it’s WebOS, maybe it’s something else, honestly I don’t know and I don’t care and I’m not supposed to care.  There is a Netflix app and a Hulu app and the like, so it can do television things.  While it is technically a computer I don’t think of it as a computer and I don’t use it as a general purpose computer and neither would any other normal person.  Other than my ability to choose which channels I watch or which apps I install to tailor the television to my needs, I would never be expected to open the hardware or alter the underlying firmware, I would never “hack” my television.  The product is defined, designed, and controlled by LG and sold as a single-purpose Smart Device with a curated and controlled experience and when it no longer works as you desire, you are intended to dispose of it and buy another one.

Almost everything I just said about my television also applies to my phone.  My current phone is also an LG, coincidentally, but I’ve also owned iPhones and Android-powered phones from other manufacturers.  All of these phones are Smart Devices and, like the television, they have a proprietary hardware design with embedded firmware that is controlled by the manufacturer.  They feature some sort of app store that allows for the installation of new capabilities, but they are sold as dedicated devices, not general purpose computers.  You cannot easily install alternate firmware or execute code that is not distributed via the app store.  You cannot replace or upgrade the internal hardware.  When they fail you are expected to recycle them and buy new ones.

Now, let’s compare that to my laptop.  In this case, it’s a Lenovo Yoga 920 but I also have an older Apple MacBook sitting nearby.  In both cases, the machine comes with an operating system, similar to the firmware on the television or phone, but with one key difference.  I can pick which operating system I would like to use and even install more than one.  My Lenovo is currently running Microsoft Windows 10 but can also boot up into Linux.  The MacBook defaults to MacOS but can also boot up to either Windows or Linux.  If I don’t want to configure multiple boot setups, I can run “virtual machines” within host operating systems.  For example, I routinely run an Android virtual machine on my Windows laptop (using BlueStacks) so that I can use certain Android apps that aren’t available on Windows.  There are no fundamental obstacles in place barring me from doing any of these things.  I bought the hardware, I choose what I want to do with it, I do not have to pay Lenovo or Apple for the privilege of using the hardware I own for general purpose computing, whatever that may be.  I bought it once, I own it, and I’m free to alter it’s behavior.  It’s more than just operating systems, though.  Let’s talk about software and data.

“Jailbreaking was never a concept in the world of personal computers and this illustrates a fundamental difference: you don’t need to break out of a jail that isn’t there.”

In the Smart Device space it is common to hear the term “side loading”.  Side loading is when you put content that is not approved by the SD manufacturer onto the device.  For instance, if you purchase an Amazon Kindle and attempt to put a book on to the device that you didn’t get from Amazon.  If a friend sends you an ePub or a PDF and says “you should read this” you can do that on your PC but not on that Kindle.  This is true for software running on Smart Devices as well.  The only way to run an application or a game on a Smart Device is via the approved channel.  Any other code that you attempt to run is side loaded and, depending on the device manufacturer, can even void your warranty and lead to your device being rendered non-functional.  This is why we have the concept of “jailbreaking” Smart Devices.  Hackers around the world have found the imposed limits of handset and tablet manufacturers to be frustrating and arbitrary and have therefore collaborated to free the devices from those constraints and allow them to run unapproved code.  Jailbreaking was never a concept in the world of personal computers and this illustrates a fundamental difference: you don’t need to break out of a jail that isn’t there.  Personal computers have, until the M1 Mac, never been designed to need jailbreaking.  They have never before come with baked in limits to what code you could run on the hardware you purchased.  This has been the case with almost all the Smart Devices every sold, but not computers.

The final point is about the hardware itself and whether or not you are intended to be able to upgrade or repair it.  If my TV or phone die, I will recycle them and buy new ones, but if the PC in my basement refuses to boot up someday, I will repair it.  Every component in the box is replaceable or upgrade-able, the power supply, the video card, and processor, the motherboard itself.  The entire hardware configuration is modular and component based.  This used to be true of virtually every computer built or sold, but in recent years laptops have become less upgrade-able and repairable, a trend lead by Apple.  It was common place to have a replaceable battery pack until Apple’s quest to make thinner and thinner machines put a stop to that.  Replaceable hard drives and memory were done away with, again by Apple, a few years ago and they started gluing or soldering the components in.  This trend towards laptops that cannot be altered from their purchased state is a choice by Apple to drive sales of new machines rather than allow users to update older machines, a sales decision, not an engineering one. Other manufacturers still offer machines that can be upgraded or fixed when there are hardware failures, but Apple has made the modern MacBook an entirely disposable product and many other manufacturers have followed suit.  Consumers haven’t generally complained too much since most of them didn’t really upgrade, repair, or replace things but this freedom to alter the configuration of the hardware you own has nonetheless long been one of the defining characteristics of a Personal Computer as opposed to a Smart Device.

This brings us to the new M1 Macs and the final step in the Apple plan to transform the Mac from a Personal Computer into a Smart Device.

A lot of people seem to forget that when the iPhone was originally announced, there was a ton of skepticism.  Nobody thought that people would shell out the money Apple was asking and Apple themselves were not entirely sure how they would fare in the market and the most glaring omission from the original iPhone was the App Store.  Apple had no idea how insanely profitable it would be to get a cut of all that sweet app revenue and actually had planned for the iPhone to work entirely with mobile web applications on Safari.  They did not allow for third-party app developers.

When they launched the App Store it was a big deal.  I was one of the early sign-ups, having been developing software professionally for 13 years.  I really loved learning to code for the iPhone.  The code-signing and App Store signup process and all that was a pain in the ass, but I did it.  It was an exciting time but it was by no means without controversy.  Developers HATED the constraints of the App Store model.  If I wanted to write a game and give it to a friend to play on their PC (Windows, Mac or Linux), I could do it, but there was suddenly no way to write software for this new phone without paying Apple a hundred bucks a year, filing a bunch of paperwork with them, and getting their approval of my app?  This was unprecedented.  The first app I ever submitted to the App Store, Virtual Bacon, was rejected by Apple because it didn’t have enough practical use.  Of course it didn’t, it was silly, it was an app to virtually fry bacon on your phone but I was not allowed to share it with the world because Apple didn’t like it.  I couldn’t even put it on the web and let people install it themselves because Apple wouldn’t allow side-loaded apps to run.

Despite all the developers who were rankled by this new way of doing things, Apple counted on the fact that end users wouldn’t care about developers feelings, only that their phone was sexy, and Apple was right.  End users didn’t care.  They loved the closed device with the curated experience and made Apple the richest company in tech.  The developers mostly got over the initial shock of learning to develop for such a draconian platform.  The ones who truly wanted freedom just went to Android or the web instead, where there was more of an open road and one didn’t need to pay to play.  Apple, in the meanwhile, started to see the beauty of raking in 30% of every App Store sale for software they didn’t have to code themselves.  That was straight to the bottom line with only the overhead of the approval process, which was partially offset by collecting annual developer dues.  Apple learned that they could get tens of thousands of software developers to pay Apple for the privilege of selling their apps to Apple customers while simultaneously giving up 30% of their own sales revenue to Apple.  Never in the history of computing has a company done so little to earn so much revenue as Apple did with this model.  From a stockholders perspective, this was beautiful.  From a small developers perspective it was highway robbery.

There was one fly in the ointment for Apple, however.  The Mac.  The Mac had been around since 1984 but had never managed to garner more than about 10% of the PC market, no matter what.  It took very little time for the Mac to be overtaken by the iDevices and the almighty App Store on the Apple balance sheet when it came to the core business of making money for Apple.  Apple launched a Mac App Store but it wasn’t the same.  The Mac App Store was an option, but not the only one.  Software could still be purchased, sold, downloaded, distributed, installed, and executed for the Mac without Apple seeing a dime in revenue.  This had always been the case and it seemed it always would be.  If Apple wanted to make the Mac more profitable, they needed to close that third party software gap, at least for the vast majority of consumers.

They also needed to sell more Macs and there they faced a second problem.  If they couldn’t gain market share, if 10% was the cap, they needed to sell more Macs to those 10% of users.  Study after study showed that Mac users tended to use their computers for much longer than Windows users.  This was trumpeted by Apple as proof that while the upfront cost of purchasing a Mac was higher, the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) was lower.  If I spend 50% more for a piece of hardware up-front but it’s usable life is three times longer than the competition, my TCO for the more expensive machine is actually lower.  These TCO arguments were great for Mac users arguing with PC users in internet forums, but they didn’t seem to really drive sales.  The same could be said for the “halo effect”, a term that referred to the idea that consumers would buy iDevices and, in turn, decide to replace their Windows machines with Macs.  Remember the old “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercials?  The Switch Campaign?  Apple tried, repeatedly, to expand the Mac user-base, but they could never quite get there.  So, they fell back on plan B.  Make Macs disposable.

The process of altering the Mac laptops to make them harder to upgrade started as early as 2012, but the final straw was in 2016 (https://www.vice.com/en/article/xygmyq/new-macbook-pros-mark-the-end-of-upgradeable-apple-computers) with that year’s MacBook Pro.  The desktop iMac was also redesigned along similar lines to make it nearly impossible for a normal person to do so much as add RAM or replace a failed drive.  The entire Apple computer lineup, with the exception of the insanely expensive Mac Pro desktop machine, was designed to be thrown away.  The one exception, the only remaining modular machine in the Apple lineup, currently has a STARTING price of $6000.  So, while it is technically true that Apple still sold an upgrade-able machine, the vast majority of users, 99% of the Apple consumer base, would never even touch one.

This strategy allowed Apple to stimulate new Mac sales to the same people who currently owned Macs, but not as fast as one would like.  It became important to establish a schedule for obsolescence for the Macs just as they had for the iDevices.  Users needed to run into a point at which they needed to buy new hardware to run the latest software (even if that point had no real technical rationale).  Apple decided to end the Mac OS X operating system development group and instead converge the iOS and Mac OS dev efforts.  They even renamed MacOS to macOS to be more like iOS and watchOS.  Apple expects iPhone users to buy a new device every two years, iPad users more like three, but Mac users were holding on to machines for five to seven years.  That wouldn’t do.  The solution? Keep pushing out updates to macOS and cutting older machines off the supported hardware list.  Again, this strategy worked to drive adoption to newer hardware and stimulate Mac sales, up to a point, but it also had the internal benefit of allowing Apple to avoid maintaining any responsibility for any backwards compatibility for older hardware and therefore save internal development costs.

There was one final piece to the Mac strategy that is worth noting.  It was certainly going to be controversial when they made the Mac hardware disposable, but they powered through.  It was the same logic by which they removed the headphone jack on their phones, closing another gap in their ultimate control of the user experience.  Both decisions met with initial user resistance but were ultimately copied by competitors.  The final piece was not a case of removing something, the final decision was the choice not to add something: a touchscreen.  Apple was the major innovator and pioneer in the development of touch-friendly computing via iOS.  iOS is, at it’s heart, nothing more than a touch-optimized version of Mac OS X.  It is striking, then, that Apple is the only major computer company that does not offer a touchscreen laptop or desktop and has no plans to ever do so.  The Lenovo I am using to write this post can convert into a tablet by folding in half and has a very nice touchscreen.  My phone and my iPad are both touchscreen enabled.  My Kobo e-book reader, touchscreen.  My work PC?  Touchscreen.  But the Mac?  Never.  Why?

The obvious reason, again, is revenue.  Simply put, a touchscreen Mac would cannibalize iPad sales.  Rather than do that, Apple opted to develop the iPad into a laptop replacement, even going so far as to recently market the iPad under the tagline “your next computer is not a computer”.  The App Store revenue on the iPad alone probably dwarfs revenue for the entire Mac product line.  Apple figured they didn’t need a touchscreen Mac, they just needed people to replace their Macs with iPads.  For many consumers, this is enough, but there is still this stubborn group of users who want an actual computer.  They still buy MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Minis and, those who are really rich might even buy that $6k machine.  These users balk at the idea of attaching a keyboard to an iPad and pretended it is a general purpose computer.

I get it.  I have an iPad Pro with a keyboard sitting here and a MacBook Pro.  They run almost the same software, they are almost the same machine, but the MacBook can simply do a lot more.  If there were only one litmus test needed to highlight the difference, ti would be this: I cannot write software for the iPad by using the iPad.  Let me repeat that.  I cannot create software for an iPad by using an iPad.  In order to create software for an iPad, I need a Mac.  This stands in stark contrast to every personal computer ever made.  Personal computers have always allowed the user to create and compile software on the machine itself.  The freedom to code on a self-contained machine.  The iPad fails that test and the Mac passes that test and for many, myself included, this makes the iPad a Smart Device and the Mac a Personal Computer, even setting aside all the other differences.

So an iPad with a keyboard isn’t a full replacement for a MacBook Pro and can’t be unless iPad users (and iPhone users) can code on their own devices, but they can’t.  If Apple made a touchscreen Mac, enough of their users would prefer that to the iPad+keyboard option so they won’t offer that.  How do they resolve this?  By closing the final gap on the Mac.

I’ve already discussed the fact that the Mac hardware refresh cycle was shortened by a move to disposable hardware and aggressive software updates, how Apple has consistently avoided adding the now industry-standard touchscreen to the Mac to avoid harming iPad sales, and how they have managed to reap massive revenues from the App Store model on iDevices but generally failed to see the same results on the Mac.  The remaining pivot in strategy, after trying all these other avenues, was pretty obvious and I am certainly not the first person who saw it coming.  The final step was to put the Mac in the same “jail” as the iDevices and thereby force all Mac software revenue to come through the Mac App Store.  There was only one problem.  Intel hardware.

The MacBook Pro and the Lenovo Yoga I keep referring to are, in almost every meaningful sense, the exact same machine.  Both are light, modern, laptops with metal shells, similar sizes, similar keyboards, SSD hard drives and Intel processors inside.  They can both run Windows or Linux, and, although Apple has made it difficult to run macOS on non-Apple hardware, both machines can technically run that as well.  There are a few differences.  The Lenovo has a touchscreen and a fingerprint sensor and can convert into a tablet.  It also cost much less than the Mac did.  Both machines, however, are fundamentally the same computing architecture.  Both machines allow me to write code that I can run on them.  Both let me explore and hack and use the computer however I wish.  As long as Apple machines are based on standard Intel hardware there is little that can be done to change this fact.  It was therefore not surprising when Apple announced their intention to take the final step and make their own proprietary processor, the M1.

This was a long time coming.  Apple had to build the facilities to produce chips and also develop the expertise in chip design.  They began with the A-series chips that have powered the iDevices.  Having complete control over both the hardware and the software and free from the hassles of making upgrade-able hardware, the A-series processors could be altered and developed in any way Apple desired with absolutely no consumer impact beyond the usual “buy a new device every couple of years” thing.  Apple could, and often did, even cause apps you already owned and purchased to cease functioning with no warning when it would have been extra work to maintain backwards compatibility with those apps.  They tested the waters and found that consumers got used to several things that were once unimaginable: daily software updates pushed out to devices, loss of ability to downgrade, and the straight up deletion of apps that the user had bought and paid for without any sort of refund or credit.  This slow boiling of the consumers allowed them to streamline their hardware development and maintain the 18-month cycle and healthy profit overhead.  Eventually they needed to move the Mac to this more-profitable business model in order for it to continue to be worth it for them and after years of experience with the A-series processors, they finally reached the promised land with the M1.  They have finally got a proprietary processor that they believe they can sell.

The rationale Apple has pushed for all of these moves?  Ease of use, or security, or thinner and lighter, or faster, or freedom to innovate, all of these reasons for moving the Mac in this direction might be good marketing PR, but they are fundamentally bullshit.  There are ways to develop products that are secure, thin and light, fast, innovative, and all the rest without also being locked down, proprietary, closed or disposable.  Other manufacturers recognize this and Apple of old did as well.  But the iDevice paradigm is such a good business model and you wouldn’t want a free computing experience to get in the way of a good business model, would you?

The M1 Mac will not have a single upgrade-able component and it will be incapable of executing unsigned code.  An individual developer will be capable of self-signing code on their own machine for development purposes, but any distribution of software to anybody else will require they pay Apple for the privilege, unless they distribute their software as source code and the other user signs and compiles a copy for themselves.  The M1 Mac will be unable to run other operating systems.  Linux and Windows will not be options.  Even if they were somehow able to be tricked into running on the M1, they would not be usable, it will be a jailbroken device at that point and could be bricked.  An M1 Mac will be a disposable, fully controlled device, not a general purpose computer, no matter how many apps you might have available to run on it.  For most people, this is irrelevant and Apple is counting on that.  Very few people think about the developer community that creates the software they consume or the issues of right to repair and hardware and software platform openness that those developers are passionate about.  Most consumers just want their computer to be a TV with a keyboard and the internet and for these consumers, an M1 Mac will be indistinguishable from whatever other Apple stuff they use today and Apple will make a mint.

Apple has every right to move the Mac to this closed model, but I, as a consumer, have every right to reject the model and opt for freer, more flexible, and less limiting options.  The Mac was once the most powerful Personal Computer on the market, capable of running any OS and almost any code you could imagine with a long life, high end engineering, and upgrade-able components that justified the higher upfront costs, but with the M1 Apple has taken the final step in the gradual and intentional transformation of the Mac into just another Smart Device, that one oddball member of the iPhone family that happens to have a physical keyboard stuck to it.  It’s ceased to be a PC, it’s now the macDevice.

Ironically, I believe this may ultimately lead to touchscreen MacBooks.  Once all sales on the Mac platform are forced through the lucrative App Store gates and third party innovation on the Mac is effectively quashed, Apple may feel freer to allow the Mac to be more iPadesque just as they have allowed the iPad to get more Macish.  With the macDevice as just another form-factor variant of the same basic product, the freedom to blur the lines between iPhone/iPad/macDevice without harming revenues of other product lines may get the basic MacBook hardware design to evolve for the first time in a decade.  Who knows?  I know one thing, I won’t be along for the ride.  The Apple strategy to achieve the macDevice without market rejection has been well-executed and blindingly obvious for many years.  Each step has followed logically from the one before it and I jumped ship several years ago, one of the earlier Mac faithful who Apple failed to lead down this particular garden path.  I wish to own the things I own, maintain the right to repair and alter those things, and retain the freedom to use them as I see fit for as long as I wish.  If I purchase a product, I do not wish the manufacturer to then dictate the terms under which I can use it or maintain control over how long I can use it.  On more than one occasion, Apple has disabled and deleted software I depended on or enjoyed, while providing no rollback plan and no financial credit, with little or no notification.  For a decade they have removed jacks and ports and hardware options to suit themselves and their business model with every new generation of their products, providing less and less in the way of choice while increasing their grip on users who are too invested in the Apple ecosystem to ever be willing to spend the time and effort to escape.  An Apple consumer can do anything they like with an Apple product unless Apple doesn’t like it and they can only move to another platform by repurchasing music, apps, devices, cables, videos, and peripherals.  The macDevice belongs in this iteration of Apple.  It is the embodiment of Tim Cook Apple.  But don’t call it a Personal Computer.  If it has to be jailbroken and side-loaded in order to run approved code, and then disposed of when it’s reached it’s pre-determined end of life, what you’ve got there isn’t a computer, that’s a Smart Device.

Posted on
by
The legendary Lavone, me on the left, Rhett on the right

My elder brother, Rhett (1972-2005), was a musical prodigy who explored and experimented with music from pre-school until his untimely death from blood clots in his lungs at the ridiculously young age of 32. I grew up in his musical shadow and I constantly wonder what songs he would be making today if he was still here to make them.

I will be first to admit that although I loved my brother fiercely, I did not always understand him or where he was going with his music. For almost 20 years he and I formed the core of the experimental art-rock band The Lavone (which rhymes with “the phone” not “the fawn” in case you are wondering) and in that time we recorded 16 albums worth of lo-fi indie weirdo music that, it nothing else, amused the two of us immensely. Rhett and I often worked in a sort of alone/together process. We would independently write songs, sometimes more fully formed than others, and we would bring them to each other for completion and elucidation. I would usually take a guitar, figure out a few chords, write some lyrics, and bring the idea to Rhett who would fill in the drums and the rest of the production. Rhett usually worked in a more, shall we say, oblique way. Rhett would have the whole song in his head and would come to me and attempt, in vain, to get me to hear it too. He would play one or two chords, usually chords involving more fingers than it seemed he ought to have, and he would hum or sing a line or two, and then he would paint a verbal picture of the rest of what he was hearing and I would smile and nod and wait for the core of the recording to appear from one of his solo sessions on 4-track. Then he would play me the fleshed-out version and say “See!” and I would be completely incapable of connecting the thing I was hearing with the two chords I had heard a week previous but I would always be astonished.

Sadly for Rhett, he spent most of his musical life trying to stuff 48-track musical ideas into 4-track recording technology. Many of his recordings sound muddled and muffled, not because he intended them to, but because he had to bounce down so many tracks onto so many generations of tape in order to fit all the parts in his head on to the recording. He only spent the last 6 years of his life with access to modern digital audio workstation technologies and some of what he did with that freedom still gives me chills and I am one of the few people (perhaps the only one) who can hear his earlier recordings on tape while simultaneously hearing his full-color vision in my mind because, well, I was on the inside of his process.

It was recently suggested to me that I should create a curated playlist with commentary for the world and the idea appealed to me (although this is clearly not what Scott had in mind) so I have set myself the challenge of putting together 7 songs that highlight, for me, the things that made my brother’s music so powerful and influential in my life. Why 7? I don’t know. Seemed like a good choice for an arbitrary number. Are these his best songs? I don’t know. But they are songs that I have returned to over and over and over again for many many years.

1. Oh No – When Rhett was 16 he fell in love with a 29-year-old woman and she loved him back. This did not go over well with our parents and they stopped the two from seeing each other. Nothing physical ever transpired between them, but they were absolutely kindred spirits and when Rhett was cut off from her, his heart was shattered. I always found it interesting that as an adult Rhett ended up marrying a different woman who was also 13 years his senior. This first song, “Oh No”, was recorded in 1988 and appeared on one of the early albums by The Lavone recorded on a home stereo before we even had multi-track capability. Armed with only a Moog synthesizer, a guitar, bass, a drumset, a microphone, and a delay box, Rhett created a moody, sad, impassioned, ethereal, poem of a song that captured his teenage heartbreak. He played every instrument on this track via overdubbing, playing the drums first and then playing the keyboards along with onto a second tape, then adding the vocals and guitar onto yet another tape. This song was a staple of The Lavone and we performed it on stage at what turned out to be our final live performance in 2000. At that show, 12 years after he first laid it down, I finally got to play along with one of my favorite early Rhett songs. Years later I would record a cover for myself, but I give you here the original, The Lavone’s “Oh No”.

 

2. Hi, My Name Is Rhett Sutter – My second choice dates to 1991 which, at the time, seemed a lifetime from “Oh No”. “Hi…” appeared on The Lavone’s 1991 album “A Concert For No-One” and featured an older, wiser, 19-year-old Rhett attempting to paint a musical portrait of himself. Rhett started his musical life as a drummer so I always thought it was fascinating that his self-portrait at the time is set to the simple beat of a metronome and focuses instead on a sort of deranged carnival of synthesized sounds while he sings about how he sees himself versus the roles he plays versus how people interpret him and what he wants to be. This song has, to put it mildly, a lot going on. Despite the driving metronomic beat, almost nothing else ever repeats, there are few motifs, and around 6 minutes in the song appears to be fading out before storming back for some discordant piano notes. I remember him working on this one over the course of a few weeks. It is experimental and abstract, hardly a pop song, but it’s original title was “Here I Am” and he was attempting, to the best of his ability, to put the inside of his head on tape and if you surrender to the weirdness, this song is about as honest and compelling to me today as it was the first time he played it for me back in high school.


3. Gossip Gossip Gossip – I cannot even begin to describe how much I love it when Rhett growl-screams “really gets on my nerves / it’s cheesy / it’s lying and vain / all the stupid people / got nothing better to say / than gossip!” at the beginning of this song. It was the early 90’s, he was maybe 20 years old, and he here is just spewing beautiful venom at the top of his lungs over a sequence of truly diabolical chords that I could barely play. This song was recorded as part of our short-lived band Purple Triangles which brought Rhett and I into recording partnership with Chad Astleford and Sy Park. Unlike on most of the previous Lavone recordings, PT generally recorded as a foursome and so Rhett had to teach us to play his insane chords which he wrote on a piano and then looked up how to play on the guitar. This session he was a mad conductor, counting us in, writing out our parts, and literally guiding us through every twist and turn of the mini-symphony about the shallow vapidity of “all the stupid people”. All the Triangles sessions were fun, whether we were recording Sy’s brokenhearted power pop, or Chad’s blistering guitar solos, but the Gossip Gossip Gossip session was for me one of the purest joys of that year of recording. Rhett was so into it, such a studio tyrant, and I had no idea what the end result was going to be, only he did, and the final song still rocks my socks, I still think this is one of the quintessential Rhett vocal performances, and I’m still kinda mad at him for bending my fingers into all of those unnatural shapes.

4. Spiritually – Of all the fan mail we ever got back when NuclearGopher.com was a thing, two stick in my mind. The first favorably compared my brother Reed’s song “Melinda” to the Indigo Girls, which infuriated Reed to no end (he hated the Indigo Girls) and made me laugh hysterically. The second called this song, Spiritually, “the best song I have ever heard”. If I were forced at gunpoint to pick the most Rhett song of all the Rhett songs, this might be the winner. Recorded for his first released solo album “Rhett!”, this song has it all. Marvin Gaye-esque vocals, synth strings, slide guitars (I get chills around the 3-minute mark when they sweep in), unexpected chord changes, funky drumming, discordant soloing, and a surprise ending. I consider it all the more impressive when I consider that he wrote, performed, engineered, mixed, and mastered this thing all by himself using only a four-track tape player. Rhett was a deeply spiritual person who believed wholeheartedly in God. He didn’t usually write directly about this because the religion we were raised in frowned on that sort of direct messaging but he put it front and center on this track and that too, was Rhett. These songs are supposed to demonstrate some of his many different facets and so many of them are on display in Spiritually it really is quite a perfect showcase of who my brother was.

5. Floatin’ – On the final Lavone album, 2000’s Isotope, Rhett was finally unleashed from the confines of the 4-track and given all the tracks he could eat and he responded to this suddenly broad canvas by cramming 40+ tracks of audio into a pop symphony that weighs in at just over two minutes long. Saxophones, flutes, bass harmonicas, walls of voices, layers of percussion, banjo, this is the full Brian Wilson, the full Phil Spector, the full Polyphonic Spree, you can listen to it 30 times and find something you missed on every listen. I have now been listening to Floatin’ for 20 years and I still feel like the song is a rushing river that is pushing me, lifting me, tearing through a canyon, on-rushing, overwhelming me. He spent months on this one, bringing various people into the basement studio, teaching them the parts he needed them to play, borrowing instruments from friends, all to finally record that epic, towering, spectacle he had been aiming for all those years but lacked the technology to execute with this clarity and focus. He was so happy working on Floatin’ and he made a point of having each of us Sutter boys take a verse. Reed goes first, then Rhett takes the second verse, and then I get the third verse. I was honored.

6. Blues Around My Soul – If “Oh No” is representative of the early days of The Lavone, “Blues Around My Soul” is the perfect representative of the end. The final Rhett track on our final album, I have always thought of this song as the closing statement from The Lavone and therefore the end of an era of my partnership with my brother made all the more poignant for me by the fact that we had no idea that would be true at the time. Yes, we recorded a little more Lavone music over the next couple of years (one other song completes this list), but we never released another album together and most of our final recording sessions were lost to history. BAMS is a beautiful song with lush arrangements, beautiful harmonies, stirring chord changes, and an amazing vibe that makes me tear up every time I hear it. In this song Rhett was writing about his sadness over our mother’s deteriorating mental and emotional state at the time and the heavy toll it took on her relationships with us kids. He had long told me that he felt he was unable to connect emotionally with her, always felt abandoned and unloved, and he poured that into this song. It wasn’t his only work on the subject, but this one came at a particularly tough time for us all as she was beginning to suffer from the delusions and issues that would ultimately cause her to leave for parts unknown, never to be seen by any of us again. I don’t actually know where my mother is or if she is still alive and I can’t help but think on that while I listen to this one, knowing I will never hear either of their voices again.


7. Keep On Receiving Joy – Last but certainly not least, I choose “Keep On Receiving Joy”, from Rhett’s final album, Londa, recorded and released in 2004, the year before he died. This song was originally recorded as The Lavone and is actually the last released song that he and I worked on together. I contributed guitar and some backing vocals and the rest is pure Rhett. This song turned out perfect, IMO, but it’s development was a long and winding road featuring at least three alternate versions with completely different vocal and lyrics and at least one alternate title, Omens and Signs. We put in a lot of session time trying to get this one to match the picture in his head and when I edited together the photo montage for his funeral service, this was the song that concluded it. I really could see no better choice. This is a perfect song from his final album that perfectly reflects his tastes, his talents, and his beautiful soul and loving heart. Rhett could never have known that this would be among the final acts of musical creation of his life, but I know “Keep On Receiving Joy” encapsulates what he would want for anybody. Love. Joy. Peace. And harmony. Always harmony. Keep on receiving joy.

Posted on
by

The first time I ever encountered a conspiracy theorist I was 16 years old and out in the door to door ministry with some fellow teenage Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was mid-summer, a really hot one, and I was paired up with Bobby Norbohm. We went to a door and knocked and a little old man answered the door. He was short, slim, rosy skin tone, a halo of white hair, and oddly enthusiastic about our visit. He invited us in to his air conditioned living room and offered us beverages. Witnesses face a lot of rejection in the door-to-door game, quite a lot, so a cool room on a hot day with a friendly face is rather welcome. Also, Bobby’s green 1970-something GM Behemoth didn’t have air conditioning, you just had to roll the windows down and sweat all over the pleather.

I got no hint of threat, no sense of anything inappropriate, he just seemed like somebody who wanted to talk, and so I plowed into my presentation of the magazines or books or whatever it was I was presenting that day. I can’t recall but that’s mainly because of what happened next. He brushed aside everything I was trying to sell him to hit me with a counter-offer. He wanted to tell us the score. He took out a well used and clearly loved Bible and started countering my scriptures with scriptures of his own and in mere minutes we were deep into dueling interpretations of the book of Daniel. Now, I don’t know that I can adequately describe how spectacularly unsettling it was to have a householder who was a) even more Biblically literate than I was and b) equipped with an equally intricate net of theology. Witnesses treat the Bible like it’s a giant puzzle that explains itself through tens of thousands of cross-references between the different pieces and they have the only key to correctly understanding it. Rarely if ever do they encounter other people out in the wild who have the same basic approach but reach different conclusions. I was at a loss and so was Bobby, but the visit hadn’t yet gotten supremely weird. It was just uncomfortable to feel, for the first time I could remember, like there was a chance the householder actually knew the Bible better than I did. How could I preach to a person like that?

As it turned out, that was just the warm up. The little man was vigorously surfing scripture upon scripture to illuminate his interpretation of a prophecy about the tribes of Israel, connecting current events and the world situation to his scriptures as I struggled to find the scriptures in my own Bible fast enough to keep pace when he suddenly started talking about Maitreya. Who or what was Maitreya? Good question. Apparently, Maitreya was/is a guru/teacher/leader who has taken over the United Nations and all the major world governments, presenting himself as a benevolent and wise entity, but who is actually (surprise!) Satan. According to our host, Maitreya appears and disappears at will at gatherings of the rich and powerful, and they do whatever he asks them to do. Maitreya is charismatic. Maitreya is devious. He’s the devil and you cannot take his picture, for some reason.

I asked why, if all of this is true, I have never heard the name Maitreya in my life. Also, much of his supporting material for these claims involved the Illuminati and Freemasons and “history” I had never heard of. I asked him how he could possibly know all of this when it wasn’t in history books or the library or encyclopedias. This was the late 1980’s and the internet wasn’t a thing outside of universities and government agencies. He said that the real truth was never published because the government controls the libraries, the television, the radio, the newspapers, but he knew the truth because he had connected, via computer, to other people who knew the truth. He even had a picture of Maitreya printed out that he could show us.

That was his first major slip up. He said he had a photo of the devil who he just said could not be photographed and seemed not to notice the inherent contradiction. What was going on here?

I had never before heard the term “conspiracy theorist”. The X-Files wouldn’t make it’s debut for about another 4 years. I didn’t even have a term in my vocabulary for a person like this. I was creeped out and kinda fascinated and he just kept spinning more weirdness. Pretty soon there were alien lizard people and god knows what else involved in the alternate universe he was describing. Bobby and I started giving each other nervous glances and seeking a graceful escape. This man was as deep down the alternate reality conspiracy rabbit hole as anybody I’ve since met and he was apparently doing this, erm… research(?) entirely via pre-internet dial-up bulletin board systems.

By the time Bobby and I did manage to extricate ourselves and return to our sweltering, partially melted, compatriots, my eyes had been opened not to the lizard people, Maitreya, the lost tribes of Israel or the Illuminati but rather, to the idea that there were people who were trading and consuming underground “knowledge”. Off the books, unauthorized, unofficial. Claims and theories and speculations, oh my. Had the story ended there it would have been sufficiently strange to my teenage brain but there is a slightly disconcerting coda. A couple of days after that visit with the old man, a book appeared on the doorstep of our house. It was just sitting on the front step, no note, no explanation. It was a book about everything the guy had been talking about, his entire spiel of weirdness, all the conspiracy kook stuff, in a paperback, sitting on my goddamn front step.

To this day I have no idea how he found out where I lived but he obviously did. I was so freaked out by the book that I destroyed it. Tore it to pieces, threw it away. I thought about burning it.

A few years later there was the X-Files and the internet and I started to become more and more aware of the world of conspiracy theories. The JFK assassination, the moon landing, subliminal Disney porn, the secret leaders of the world, Area 51, etc, etc, etc. We all did, as a society. We collectively became acquainted with and absorbed the fact that there are people who believe all this alternate history and alternate reality stuff and, collectively, we considered it to be great entertainment and mostly harmless but I have never forgotten the passion in that man’s voice, the fervor of a true believer preaching The Truth About Everything, and he would know, because he had the photos. Did I want to see them?

I write all of this because here we are, 30+ years later, and instead of a rare, fascinating, troubled soul tilting at windmills from his dial-up modem, connecting with the handful of people like him who Know It’s All A Lie, we have a president and millions of people in the country who believe some set or subset or parallel to the same wildly fantastic nonsense that man believed. They don’t have to work for it, don’t have to plumb the depths of BBS systems and trace teenage Jehovah’s Witnesses to their homes, they just have to take their phones out of their pockets, open a social media app, and pretty soon QAnon shoots straight into their eyeballs from the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. I can barely fathom how weird it is, that in my lifetime, the entire concept of objective reality, trusted news sources (Walter Kronkite! Dan Rather!), and a shared understanding of the world has come under such threat, such assault, that I think back to Maitreya Man as the earliest canary in the coal mine of modern life.

Maitreya Man is probably no longer with us, he would likely be pushing 100 by now, but the way he thought, the ways he conducting “research”, the fascinating combination of high intelligence with an out-of-control pattern recognition function in his brain that caused him to see connections literally everywhere, the paranoia and delusion that must have fed him, and the fledgling underground community of which he was a part, this stuff became a business model and a poison that has penetrated into every nook and cranny of our society. Technology has enabled and accelerated it and allowed all the various conspiracy theories to mutate, adapt, flourish, grow, and draw eyeballs and mindshare. The Left-leaning fringe is prone to this type of “thinking”, and generally always have been, but the heart of the Right, the absolute MAGA core of one of the two major political parties in this country, has completely embraced the insanity, which is frankly even more surprising. I mean, the conservatives of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, these were not the people who believed in alien lizard people, these were the salt of the earth types, they vaccinated their livestock and their kids, they were proud that America beat the Russkies to the moon and in the Cold War, they didn’t go in for any of that crazy talk, and now they can’t even agree the earth is round and a shocking percentage of them believe Hollywood actors drink baby blood or something batshit insane like that.

How on earth did the most normal of normal people get turned into raving Maitreya Men and Maitreya Women?

Sure, the answers are there. Alex Jones, Fox News, Trump, Facebook, blah blah blah, they are clearly being exposed to more outlets of disinformation that is divorced from reality than they are chemtrails, but my god, what can be done about it? Anything? Are we just all doomed to live in a world now in which a huge number of people aren’t really sure whether or not reality is… reality? Where evidence against the things they say is either ignored or converted into evidence for what they say? Because let’s be honest here, none of this would be happening if there wasn’t money being made on peddling disinformation, conspiracy, and crackpot bullshit. As long as a market exists there will be sellers. The only possible solution is to reduce the number of people who are vulnerable to falling for this stuff. Every insane conspiracy theory has a website somewhere debunking all of it’s claims. Sometimes I read these things just for fun, keep an eye on the state of the state and all that. The theory sites have certain things in common. They tend to make grandiose statements without evidence, they usually make a lot of claims that all fail, on their own merits, to stand up to critical scrutiny but together are considered “a pattern”, they commit logical fallacies, they contradict their own logic, etc. The debunking sites usually take on the “evidence” with actual evidence, point by point, and demolish the theory and it makes no difference whatsoever. The Sandy Hook Massacre was a False Flag. NASA never landed on the moon. Fluoride is for mind control. Hillary Clinton is a lizard person. Michelle Obama is a man. On and on and on, evidence be damned.

The debunking approach, satisfying as it may be, doesn’t work for the simple reason that believers never visit debunking sites. If they are directed to them by a loved one, they may grudgingly look at the site for two seconds but they immediately reject the debunker as somebody who doesn’t get it or a tool of the masterminds behind the conspiracy. Of course the Freemasons have a website demonstrating that the moon landing was real! That site is part of the wool being pulled over your eyes sheeple!

So, if we can’t debunk our way out of this, what do we do? How do we get through to somebody who is in the grip of an induced delusion/psychosis, in the sway of a maniac cult leader like Donald Trump who is retweeting QAnon lunacy? This is no longer one isolated old man in a basement, this is tens of millions of citizens of this country. This is terrifying. What can possibly be done? I am sad to say, I offer no solutions, no hope. I have never won an argument with a conspiracy theorist, never seen a case where they turn around and come back to consensus reality. I’ve never heard of anything that works to right this wrong when it occurs in a human mind. I’d love a glimmer of hope, if you have any to offer. Please.

Failing that, can I please just suggest, humbly, that we all do our best to make critical thought respected and valued again and look for ways to fight this collective mental virus? We can’t be a functioning society if 30-40% of us believe an alien cabal of lizard people is eating babies and one of them is George Soros and he faked the death of Hugo Chavez as part of a plot to steal the 2020 election by reprogramming all the voting machines so that nobody will uncover the secret that NASA faked the space program by building cellular towers that caused coronavirus and the earth is actually flat and somehow the LGBTQ+ are in on it too but I’m not sure why or how yet but also Starbucks coffee cups hate Christians. Or something. This is not sustainable and it’s not something we can argue and debunk away.

Posted on
by

Last week I was pretty depressed.  I didn’t really want to do much of anything.  I laid around the house, played video games, felt like garbage most of the time.  One thing I have learned is that when I am feeling that way it can be beneficial to pick up one of my many languishing projects and attempt to make some sort of progress on it.  This can mean taking a half-build model car and painting a few pieces, or soldering some bits on to a circuit board for a guitar pedal that I never finished making, or maybe performing a small repair on something.  Whatever IT is, I have found that performing some small task that feels like progress can be like blowing a little air on last nights embers when the fire feels like it’s mostly burned out.  When I’m really low I don’t even want to do that much but if I make myself take the first step, I tend to fall forward to the next step.

This particular week I have been distracting myself from my depressing internal monologue by browsing guitars online. I have several guitars.  I do not need another guitar.  I do not, however, have a Fender Jazzmaster and I nearly convinced myself that I don’t need another guitar, but I do need a Jazzmaster.  Blowing hundreds of dollars on a guitar might distract me a bit further but I am well aware that it won’t actually get me out of my funk.  In my experience, “retail therapy” is an illusion created by capitalism.

No, I didn’t buy a Jazzmaster but I DID remind myself that I have a clone of a Rickenbacker 350 down in the basement that is about 90% complete.  I built the thing but I never painted it or installed the electronics and hardware.  What if, instead of buying a guitar, I brought the “Ryanbacker” one step closer to life?  So, that’s what I did.  I took it out, took stock of what needed to happen next, did a few woodworking and masking tape things to it, and ordered some paint for it from StewMac.  Once I had gotten as far as I could with that I was in the mood to do something else.   I owed my grandma a letter so I sat down at my typewriter and wrote it.  In the letter I mentioned a song I recently recorded so I decided I should burn a CD for her with a few tunes, including that one.  I logged on to the studio computer and before I knew it I was cataloging some old session files and had made some new reference mixes of some old tapes.  And so it went, all day, one thing followed from the one before and instead of going to bed with another day of nothingness, I went to bed feeling pretty OK with how the day went.  It carried over to Sunday.  I woke up in the morning and decided that drawing sounded like an enjoyable thing to do and I drew a picture of Buckley because he happened to be right there, modeling for me.  When I was going through old tapes on the studio computer I discovered a couple of demos for songs I had written/recorded in the late 90’s that I had no recollection of.  One of them was going through my head much of the day and when I woke up this morning it was still there along with a few new musical ideas.  I’ve been pretty starved for musical ideas for quite a while.  So that was nice.

The point of all this is that I had to give myself the initial push off the couch but once I was doing stuff, other stuff just followed, and none of it was life changing but it was all better than another day sitting and being depressed.  I collected together some drawings, paintings, and other things I have made into some albums on Facebook just to remind myself of what I can do when I just DO something and it all helped drag me a couple of degrees further out of the dumps.

When the Ryanbacker paint gets here, I’ll paint it.  I did another drawing this morning before work, this time a pencil sketch self-portrait.  I intend to pick some project today and make it go forward a bit, but I don’t know what it will be.  I’m not particularly in the mood to do any particular thing, but that’s not the point.  Doing the thing will help me be in the mood to do another thing, etc, etc.  That’s the point.  I will forget this again and again and I will remember it again and again until I die, but, it will never stop being true.