I am a person who listens to new music.  At all ages, at all stages in my life, I have made a point of exploring current music, new releases, the latest things.  I try not to  discriminate by genre or popularity level when exploring new music because, hey, you never know.  Every couple of weeks I bring up Spotify (and before that, Rhapsody) and I hit play on all the new releases, seeking treasure.  I will give most songs anywhere from 20-60 seconds to provoke a positive or negative response before moving on, the ones I don’t mind get listened to all the way through, the ones I really like get added to my Library.

I have discovered that I like some Taylor Swift, and some Lorde.  I have discovered that I like TuNeYaRdS and Yaeji.  I have discovered Young Fathers and M. I. A. and Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down and plenty of other artists over the years listening like this.  Trying to keep an open mind, attempting to browse without pre-judgment.  If I hadn’t done this I probably would never have heard Baby Metal, and that would have been a tragedy.

I have other venues for exploring new sounds.  Magazine articles, websites, a couple great podcasts, but those all have an editorial filter and I usually just prefer to let music tell me if I like it or not.  Put it into my ears, that’s all I ask.

Unfortunately, particularly over the last 10 years, this process has become increasingly less profitable, and it’s not because I’ve fossilized or started making a fetish of “the good old days”, no, the fundamental reason it has become harder and harder is the rise of auto-tune on EVERYTHING.

Here’s an analogy.  Let’s say you like ketchup.  Ketchup is good.  I like ketchup on french fries like any normal guy.  Ketchup is harmless enough.  You can even use it as the primary ingredient in a homemade barbecue sauce.  Yum.  But now let’s say that you go to a restaurant where ketchup is already smothered on every single food item.  It is mixed into the coffee and iced tea.  It is on your shrimp, your salad, your steak, your carrots, your olives, your coleslaw, in your clam chowder, on your pizza, on your buffalo wings, drenching your pita, on your burrito, your sushi, your waffles.  The plates are sticky with it, the table tops slathered in it, the floor slick with it, just gallons of ketchup everywhere.  The booths are covered in it.  The walls and floors and ceiling are red.  There is a ketchup fountain.  The windows drip with ketchup.  As you take your seat in your booth and feel ketchup soaking into your underwear, how do you feel about ketchup at that point?  Will you ever be able to eat ketchup again or will the onslaught of ketchup put you off of it for life?

This, dear reader, is autotune.  This is what it does to the menu of modern music.  It takes every song from every artist in every genre on every subject and slathers them all in ketchup.  Whatever other flavors they may contain, there’s the fucking ketchup.  Rocky road ice cream?  Ketchup on top.  Strawberry crepes?  Don’t forget the ketchup.  Apple pie?  Ketchup please.  And don’t forget to put some ketchup on the side.

Now, I just read a long and impassioned defense of the artistic merits of auto-tune the other day (https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-auto-tune-revolutionized-the-sound-of-popular-music/) and I believe the author made many good points that could theoretically be defensible if it weren’t literally fucking everywhere.  If it were occasionally used in moderation, it wouldn’t be the ketchup buffet.  It’s just an effect, among many effects.  I don’t personally worry about auto-tune as some sort of purity test, some sort of “kids these days can’t sing” bullshit.  Come on, recording studios have ALWAYS been about using the technology of the day to create artificial performances that are “better than life”.  Trust me.  Even Elvis had slap-back reverb.  No, it’s not a philosophical thing or some sort of elitist judgment that people who use auto-tune aren’t “real artists”.  These are people with feelings making music.  I respect that.  I want to like it.  I want to support it.  I even defend their right to like ketchup.  They are exploiting a technology to create a sound that expresses what they want to express, I respect that.  The only problem is that I, personally, hate the sound of it and I can always hear it when it’s present, and it’s ALWAYS PRESENT NOW.  When it’s been used sparingly (i.e. – to evoke the dehumanized voice of a robot or something) for the purpose of some sort of abstract sci-fi thing for a track or two (I’m looking at you Radiohead) it feels appropriate, so, it doesn’t bother me.  I love electronic shit.  It’s just the modern vocoder, and O Superman wouldn’t be the same without the robot voice.  But I try to listen to the new releases and it’s literally on Every.  Single.  Song.  In.  Every.  Genre. and it makes them all sound like SHIT.

It’s a ketchup buffet. 

I can’t fucking stand it.  Any song, in any genre, can be ruined by this ridiculous, shitty, absurd, stupid fucking effect no matter how talented the artist.  An otherwise good beat, good melody, interesting set of lyrics, moving production, interesting song structure, moving chord progressions, can be present and sitting there, shining in the sun, making you feel something, and then it’s just demolished by the presence of this horrific sounding effect.  I don’t care if somebody can sing or not.  I don’t care if they are in tune.  I just want to hear real music by real people, but AT has become the defining sound of our era, and I have TRIED to learn to tolerate it, but it just sounds so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so BAD.  It has ruined over a decade worth of music and it just keeps happening.  It’s on every goddamn song and I just can’t listen to the effect for more than about 20 seconds without getting angry and so vast swathes of music are off limits to me and as a music lover it’s really really disappointing.  I can think of no other musical fad(?) or direction in all of musical history that has been this fingernails on chalkboard irritating.  I don’t love all music ever made, but I can listen to jazz, classical, rock, hip hop, rap, R&B, world music, reggae, spoken word, experimental, ambient, heavy metal, electronica, country, blues, you name it, and find artists I love, songs I love, sounds I love.  But not with AT vocals.  AT vocals just ruin 99% of anything they touch.  I’m sure I am missing out on music that I would otherwise consider to be brilliant.  I am sure there are many artists I would really have loved and admired if they had worked in the pre-autotune era but I can’t make it through a single track, let alone a record.  I can’t hear the “genius” because I can’t get past the gallons of ketchup drowning every syllable of every word.

I have no power to influence the tastes of the general populace who seem to have decided this sounds good.  People like mullets, Red Bull, Donald Trump, and plenty of other tacky, gross, weird, and unpalatable things, but if you can suggest some modern music that isn’t infected with this godawful corruption, I would be open to the pointers.  Any genre, any flavor, as long as it’s not smothered in ketchup.

I read this article today, The Cost of Living in Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet Empire – The Ringer, and a few things jumped out at me:

“I believe that almost everyone actually hates almost every interaction with almost every algorithm online”

and

“I miss the human internet with an intensity that borders on homesickness”

These two statements most definitely reflect my feelings.  I’ve been struggling to really describe what happened to the internet, but I think it’s accurate to state that the internet as experienced by the majority of users has effectively transitioned from the “human internet” powered by millions of individuals and entities into the “corporate internet” in which the Big Five (Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) have become so pervasive that is effectively impossible to use the internet without them.  This, in turn, has lead to a world in which the priorities of those companies define the landscape for everybody else.  

Is it even possible to live in the modern world without interacting with these companies?  I suppose you could avoid using digital technology and you could attempt to only frequent venues that similarly avoid digital technology, but it is likely impossible, short of living off the grid and growing your own food and building your own tools and furniture.

But online, well, the internet would no longer be functional for much of anything if you attempted to boycott any of these companies.  I’m not really talking about a boycott, I am talking about how much more interesting the internet was before it went into orbit around these particular stars.  Today’s internet is simply not all that interesting, not all that engaging.  It’s shallow, vapid, cheap, stupid, and ugly.  Almost everyone hates how it works and almost everyone uses it incessantly anyhow because of social networking, apps, virality, and the rise of the internet as a surveillance marketing platform rather than an information sharing platform.  

It’s fairly easy to live without Apple, mostly.  Microsoft too.  You can buy a Linux-powered laptop and a dumb-phone…  er, I mean feature phone, and at the very least you are not on their platforms, directly.  You are likely still using their products in other ways, but let’s be honest here, the two oldest tech giants made their bones by selling computer platforms, not monetizing consumer engagement, and they are the least threatening of the Frightful Five.  20 years ago, when the internet was wilder, you still probably accessed it using a computer powered by an operating system from one of the two, or Linux, or OS/2, or something else, but it really didn’t change the experience of the web.  That was just personal preference.

But then along came Google, then Amazon, and then Facebook, and each one more and more made you, the consumer, into their product.  They no longer wanted to sell you a product, they wanted to sell YOU to somebody else who wanted to sell you a product.  As all the ad revenue was pulled into their orbits, newspapers and magazines and web sites and everything else online was pulled and bent out of shape, homogenized, centralized.  Less interesting.  More boring.  Shallower.

Why?  Because, quite simply, the internet is people and the things they create and share.  People tend to create and share only in places and ways that other people are likely see, hear, or read and more and more that means on Facebook, or Instagram, and when they do self-host, the only way people will find it (if at all) is via Google search.  The internet may have vast swaths or information, but the number of independent gateways to that information is now quite small.

This new corporate internet is nothing like the fun it was before and it’s a pity.  Wishing we had the old one back isn’t nostalgia, it’s just missing something that was special and interesting, like local radio stations before Clear Channel.  The rest of the internet exists, but it’s more like a ghost town.  Old link sites that go nowhere, unmaintained blogs, and other detritus, all the traffic went to the corporate web and since the internet is just people, and people are the internet, if all the people spend 99% of their time on the same handful of platforms, then those effectively become all there is.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  The internet was supposed to be a radically decentralized, democratized, and free platform and it still is…  kinda…  technically…  but it really isn’t.  It is still possible to setup a computer in your own house, run your own stuff on it, use exclusively open-source, and even live without a FB account or ever shopping at Amazon but since so few people actually do any of this, you will be missing out on where most of human culture takes place these days.  The baby pictures you won’t see, events you won’t hear about, and interactions you won’t have will leave you on an island.  You’ll pay more money to buy things you will have more trouble locating.  

There are movements underway to try to claw back some of the freedoms we have surrendered.  One in particular, https://indieweb.org/, seems really focused on providing alternative solutions to the problems we are currently solving via the corporate web but as Kashmir Hill’s amazing experiment at GizModo demonstrates (https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five) you really can’t boycott them in the sense of never using their services.  The internet just doesn’t really work anymore without these companies.  They own the damn thing.  The best the rest of us can do is work to demonetize ourselves, get out of their funnels.  We will never wind up back in the pre-corporate web and sometimes I find myself just wishing to ditch the web for whatever comes next.  Maybe the DAT network (https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/beaker-decentralized-read-write-browser) or something like it, but, well, that’s just another ghost town…  for now.  I don’t have a solution, maybe there isn’t one, but I miss the human internet.  It was so much more enjoyable…

 

I just finished Orwell: Ignorance is Strength and it got me thinking about all the games I’ve actually managed to complete or beat in my life. It’s not a long list:

• GORF (Commodore VIC-20 version)
• Taipan! (Apple ][e version)
• Space Quest I/II/III
• Kings Quest IV
• Myst
• Every Monkey Island game (including the Telltale ones)
• Resident Evil IV
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Original NES
  • Link’s Awakening
  • The Ocarina of Time
  • A Link to the Past
  • The Wind Waker
• Zork (Text Adventure)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Text Adventure)
• Bureaucracy (Text Adventure)
• Stories Untold
• Oxenfree
• Limbo
• The Wolf Among Us
• Jurassic Park: The Game
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
• Portal
• Portal 2

There are also a few games that you can’t “beat” per se, but that I’ve played so much that I have mastered them. Sports sims:

• Madden Football series (have completed seasons in every version since 1999)
• Forza series
• F1 series

Hello and welcome to 2019. So happy we could all be here.

As a professional practitioner of agile software development practices I have a tendency to want to stop at various checkpoints and look back in order to reflect on what worked and what didn’t and try to use that information to calibrate myself for times ahead. We call this a “retro”. At my job this is a step taken every two weeks or so. Today I am going to go ahead and use the fact of it being January 1st 2019 to do a personal retro on the year that was.

I didn’t exactly make any New Year’s resolutions last year, and I don’t intend to make any this year either, but I did try to align myself in a few intentional ways at the start of the year. I tried to live more mindfully and be more present. I had hoped that, if successful, it would result in a year that seemed fuller, richer, that seemed to pass more slowly, from the perspective of my own relative sense of time. Another intention I made for myself was to maintain a focus on personal growth and learning as well as improving in my self-maintenance and care where my health was concerned.

I begin this year 12 months older but looking and feeling exactly as I did 12 months ago. I didn’t noticeably improve or damage my health. Nothing much accomplished there in the way of personal transformation. I am a little disappointed in that, but I also feel as if I made good psychological growth that will ultimately lead to some improvements in my overall fitness and health. Last year was more about my mind, this year I want to also work on my body and spirit.

One big piece of self-care for me was changing my job. The last decade has been a big one for my career. In 2008 I entered into a new stage when I started to transition from a developer and architect into a team lead, enterprise architect, and then director. I did this through a series of intentional steps. First step, taking on a team leadership at HealthPartners. Second step, moving into a combination team lead/technical architect role at Capella. Third, moving to enterprise architect at Capella. Next, taking a role as Technical Director at Olson, and then finally, Director of Software Engineering at Merrill at which point I had fully transitioned from engineering to leading engineers. A couple of years at Merrill made it clear to me that I loved this job but was still not entirely happy with where I was doing it. Fortunately, 2018 presented me with an opportunity to move to GovDocs in the fall and I couldn’t be happier. Now my role and the place I’m working are both very satisfying for me and it has been a long time since I could say that.

Creatively, this year was a mixed bag. I made some things, but not the things I had planned to. Another year without recording a new album, despite a lot of attempts at shaking the tree. Nothing really creative visually or literary either. Mostly I left behind furniture. I made some bookshelves around our stairwell and a vanity in the bathroom, among other things. I absolutely loved joining Awkward Bodies and playing gigs and now we did work on some new material and record it, so, I definitely got a little of the music done as well, but it was just not a big year on the creative front. Casually productive? More crafts than arts? I’m not satisfied but I’m also not totally unsatisfied.

The year had a lot going on, and here is a basic timeline:

• January
  • stoked about the Vikings making a deep playoff run, deluded into believing there was a shot at the Superbowl, disappointed as usual
  • excited about new Young Fathers album
• attempted to learn 6 languages at once
  • shaved off the beard I had been growing throughout the football season
• February
  • first experience with a puzzle room, quite fun actually
• March
  • Joined Awkward Bodies on bass guitar
  • joined Johnny Cash cover band
  • went to Denver, interviewed by Scott Homan for XJW documentary
• April
  • won Trivia Mafia with James
  • replaced our stairs with maple
• May
  • shoot/session at the Compound with HighTV
  • debut with Awkward Bodies
  • played Johnny Cash show
  • hung out at Rhiger’s place with Homan
• June
  • switch from Mac to PC and iPhone to Android
  • saw Spoon and Grizzly Bear
  • presented at OSN
  • more Awkward Bodies shows
  • skyscraper raccoon
  • SHT backpacking trip
  • new glasses
• July
  • My Bloody Valentine @ The Palace Theater
  • more AB shows
• August
  • got nucleargopher.com back
  • another AB show
  • Teicko’s wedding
  • met Natalie Goldberg at her book signing
  • Holden had a stroke
• September
  • $450 raised for SHAR via birthday fundraiser
  • Holden passed away
  • accidentally met Chuck Foreman at Walmart
  • bought new Fiat Spider
  • turned 45
  • took job at GovDocs
  • dinner at Angies with Jasmine and Nate
• October
  • started working at GovDocs
• November
  • Road trip to MI
  • built the bookcase around the stairs
  • Tash Sultana @ The Palace
• December
  • Ostrich video
  • three week food coma

I guess that was a fairly busy year, but I feel like I could have fit most of that in a couple weeks if I were really trying. Too much down time. 🙂

I think that’s enough looking back. It was a good year, it was fullsome, and fun, worth it. On to 2019.

New music!  And a cool video.  Woot.

What do a movie, an email application and a video game all have in common?  They are all new parts of my life over the last few days and I am going to take a moment here to record my initial thoughts, starting with the film…

The Lodgers : Directed by Brian O’Malley, 2017 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4399952/) 

Last night I watched the (alleged) horror film The Lodgers.  If there is such a thing as too much mystery and subtlety this film has it.  Despite making it all the way to the end of the film, I still have no idea what the titular “lodgers” actually were or why they did anything they did or what exactly was going on at any point in the movie.  The ambiance was solid, the performances were good, the house was spooky, but seriously, no idea what was actually happening.  Are the ghosts?  Vampires?  Lamia?  Sirens?  No idea.  If you happen to watch this (it’s on Netflix) and you understand what they are, please tell me.  I am dying to know.

Mailbird (Windows application, http://www.getmailbird.com)

I don’t know how many years I have been seeking the ultimate email client application.  Maybe forever.  Maybe I was born on another continent in a former life, eons ago, and began seeking a quality email client application, I can’t rule it out, it certainly feels that way.

This might be the strongest applicant to the job opening yet.  I’m hella impressed with Mailbird.  Hella impressed enough that I took advantage of the $29 Lifetime Pro License deal.  Reasons: 

• Clean interface with solid junk mail management
• Unified Inbox with Inbox Zero Support
• Tons of add-ons and integrations
• Social media (FB, Twitter, etc) integrated into the UI where they effin’ belong so you can catch up with all your messages in one place

This app is BOSS but sadly, is Windows only.  My quest for a perfect Linux, Mac, iOS and Android email client will continue even if I have Windows covered.

Forza Horizons 4 (XBox One)

See that picture?  That is a screenshot of a 1962 Triumph Spitfire 4 from Forza Horizon 4.  Now here is a picture of my 1969 Triumph Spitfire Mk3:

I’ve been playing Forza for a LONNNNNNNGGGGGG time.  Every version ever released for every platform.  Forza 1-7 (XBox/XB360/XBOne) and the previous three installations of Horizon and I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited than the moment I uncovered a Triumph Spitfire just like my very own sitting in an abandoned barn in the British countryside in FH4.  OK, mine is a LHD 1969 Mk3 and the one in the game is a RHD 1962 Spitfire 4, but still, that was amazingly cool and allowed me to test just how realistic the Forza experience is.  The answer?  Pretty damn.  The virtual Spit drives almost exactly like my real one.  Crazy.

That aside, here’s the skinny on this game.  As expected, the game is addictive as hell, massive, beautiful but with some BIG annoyances.  I’m going to focus on those:

• The entire “rave culture festival neon EDM blah blah hoonigan” aesthetic wears real thin real fast.  Menus are annoying, the radio stations all suck, basically they’ve gone out of their way to hype every square inch of the game and it’s really just exhausting and irritating
• The actual racing mostly sucks.  If you enjoy driving racing sims with a wheel and shifter and all that stuff (think Project Cars 2) then Forza gives you some of that and an open world and you can just tool around and have an awesome time…  until it’s time to race.  The courses are cramped, badly designed and frustrating and there is no option to learn them in advance. Events are generally 3 laps of craziness with no semblance of feeling like a sim, very arcadey, very “hyped”.  There is an event where you race a locomotive, lots of “big air” jumps, it’s very silly.  For tooling around the open world I generally drive with all assists off, manual trans with clutch, but for the races and events, I turn damage off (you WILL be rear-ended and side-swiped pretty much constantly by the idiot Drivatars) and set the driving params to lower difficulty settings just to get through them.  I find myself wishing I didn’t have to do the events to get points and XP but, well, ya gotta.
• I would love difficulty settings that would be stored with the car being used!  Forza has needed this feature for YEARS.  When I’m in my Triumph Spitfire there should be no ABS, Traction Control, or Automatic transmission.  I don’t need them for such a low powered car and they don’t make sense for a car from 1969.  On the other hand, I jump into a 1000 HP Zenmo or whatever and yeah, all that stuff.  Wish I could store those prefs with the cars instead of having to change them everytime I move from one car to another.
• The game is working so hard to through shit at you that it is often the case that you will get invited to two or more other things when you’re just on your way to doing one thing.  “Oh, I’m going to this barn find” get’s interrupted with “There is a new race” or “Hey Ryan, participate in this Forzathon Live event” or whatever, over and over.  I often tell the game to STFU and just let me play.

Basically, racing == dumb, graphics == stellar, car selection == awesome, game is too hypey and intrusive but you can tame it if it’s overwhelming.  I’d call it a win.  I just wish it wasn’t so damn silly so much of the time.  It’s like those bass fishing games where every fish is a 20-pound largemouth.  When everything is over the top, nothing is.

I am the first to admit that I have an unusual number of interests, hobbies, passions, that revolve around making things.  Software development, wood working, audio and video production, and automotive restoration, to name just a few.  Sometimes people are surprised to learn that I have almost no formal training to speak of in any of these areas.  I’ve made my living working in software development since 1994 and written tens of thousands of lines of code for more systems and apps then I can recall and worked my way up from Junior Programmer to Director but my actual education?  The BASIC programming book that came with my Commodore VIC-20 when I was 8, computer lab at Valley Middle School, the computer programming math elective in high school, and 13 months at CDI Computer Academy to learn the fundamentals of DOS, Unix, and C.  That was it.  Everything else?  Self-taught.

My other interests are no different.  Fly tying?  Bought supplies and a book, started tying.  Electronics?  Bought supplies and a book and started making guitar pedals.  Woodworking?  Bought tools and a couple books and started making furniture and guitars.  Audio production?  Bought a 4-track and instruments and microphones and started making records (it’s all computers now but that one started a loooooonnnnnngggggg time ago).  I just like making stuff.  Working with my brain and my hands to turn something into something else or make something where there was nothing before.  

I like to share my interests, I like to show people what I’m working on, and I often get asked the same questions, so here I will go about answering my Frequently Asked Questions:

Q. Where did you learn to do “X”?  

A. Reading (books, internet) to learn the theory and ins-and-outs and then hands on practice to actually learn to do it.  Experiment, practice, read, build, learn, repeat.  This applies to the time I built a kayak, the time I wrote a Zen-inspired word game, or my most recent project, a set of floating bookshelves surrounding the stairwell to my basement.  There is no magic.  Read, read again, maybe watch a video online, then experiment and try to do what you read about, and then read some more, and eventually when you feel confident enough, just do it.

Q. Where do you find the time?  You must have a lot of free time…

A.  I do not have a lot of free time.  I work full time, I have a kid and four dogs and two cats and I’m married and I have friends and I play in a band…  Free time is severely constrained.  Due to this I do not watch much, if any, television, I limit my recreational downtime (video games, leisure reading, watching movies), and I try to focus on only a couple creative projects in at a time.  When my bookshelves are 100% complete I plan to finish up one or two lingering projects before I move on to another big one.  Probably finish the guitar I built and get the transmission installed in my Fiat Spider.

Q.  Don’t you spend a lot of money on these hobbies?

A.  Not really.  I spend as little as I can get away with.  I frequent online auctions, and estate sales, and  I’m constantly looking on Craigslist for cheap (or free) tools and I often find that you can do things cheaply by just learning to do them yourself.  That’s half the fun.  How much can I do without spending money?  I once built a home-made 3-axis steadi-cam for video shoots for a total cost of $3 in parts and Razor scooter acquired at a garage sale for $1.  The biggest expenses are definitely tools and supplies but if I had paid to have my bathroom vanity custom built and installed by a professional carpenter and plumber I would have probably spent over $1000.  Materials cost for that project was under $200 and I got to have fun in the process.  DIY is just good times.  Read Make magazine sometime, lots of people have learned that you don’t need tons of money you just need patience, curiousity, and a willingness to try new things.

Q.  You need a lot of space to do all this stuff, don’t you?

A.  I’m not gonna lie, yes, space is really helpful.  Definitely for the car stuff.  I didn’t start trying to restore cars until I moved to a place with outbuildings.  My work on cars before that was basic maintenance and repair of our daily drivers and building scale models of the cool cars I wished I could drive someday.  🙂  On the other hand, when I lived in a smaller house in the burbs with only a single car garage and a basement I still had a recording studio, woodworking tools, and other stuff.  I built a thirteen foot kayak.  I recorded multiple albums.  I built a guitar.  It was more limited but not impossible.  In some ways the space limitations inspired creative solutions.

Q.  But what if you screw up?

A.  Of course I screw up.  I screw up all the time.  🙂  It’s part of the fun.  Sometimes I cut something the wrong length.  Sometimes I cut my finger when I meant to cut a board.  Sometimes I strip a screw or melt a component or sing off key and wreck an otherwise perfect vocal track.  I long ago gave myself permission to make crap, the screw up, to stay dedicated to the process of making even when those things happen.  Some of my favorite things about some of my favorite projects are actually workarounds to mistakes.  For example, I was building a vanity for my bathroom and I cut the tops to width and realized that I had made it 1 1/2 inches narrower than the mirror above.  I had wanted them to be the same width.  Oops.  I couldn’t add 1 1/2 inches.  Instead I added towel bars to both sides that were 3/4 inches wide a piece.  This made the total visual width match AND incorporated two towel bars that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.  Win/win.  Mistakes and limitations and constraints are all opportunities for creative thinking.  I ask myself: Do I really need to fix this?  Is there a way to change the project to incorporate this?  What can I learn from this mistake?  Do I need a band-aid?

Q.  Did your parents teach you to be like this?

A.  No.  No, they did not.  My parents didn’t do any of these things.  My dad was not particularly a “handy man” type around the house.  He was capable and had basic tools but I don’t remember him doing much building or making.  Maybe at his day job but not as a hobby at home.  I’m pretty sure my parents didn’t even know I had a computer.  We didn’t weld stuff.  We didn’t have woodworking tools.  They weren’t big readers either.  I didn’t really have many role models in this arena.  In school I had shop classes, wood and metal.  There were computers.  My Uncle Steve did model cars, I liked that and thought it was cool, but other than that… I didn’t even have the internet, just curiousity and the library and limited funds.

Q.  Isn’t it better to have things done professionally?  I don’t trust myself…

A.  Sometimes.  I don’t insist on doing all things myself either.  I am very conscious of the things I don’t know how to do and I’m very conscious of how much time and effort it can take to learn to do something properly.  Take auto restoration, for example.  I have three “classic” cars and a laundry list of things to do to each one.  I don’t know how to do those things.  I have never done them before.  I will probably screw up, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.  But that’s why I’m working with VERY inexpensive cars right now.  If I screw up a Fiat Spider that is worth $200, well, it’s way better than screwing up a car worth $50,000.  I expect to screw up while I’m learning and then screw up slightly less when I gain confidence.  If I don’t have the luxury of that learning process, if it needs to be done right the first time, I will pay somebody to do it who has already learned, aka, a professional.  Hardwood floors?  Paying a professional.  Replacing the siding on the house?  Ditto.  Knowing what can be tackled by me and what should be handed off is important.

Anyhow, I think it would be cool to add a portfolio section to this site to share all my fun projects with the world in case other people find them interesting.  I plan to do that.  As soon as I figure out how..  🙂

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It has recently been suggested to me that I might want to keep a running tally of things I read.  I kinda dig this idea.  Seems fairly mindful.

Anyhow, a few recent reads and brief thoughts on them:

• Uplift Series by David Brin: I have read Sundiver, Startide Rising and I’m currently reading The Uplift War, all part of the Uplift series by David Brin.  Pretty decent sci-fi series in which species are “uplifted” to full sentience by other species and shenanigans ensue.  Humans, for example, have given chimps and dolphins a genetic bump up the old ladder so they are now doctors and scientists and star-ship captains.  Great concept, sometimes slightly bad writing, I expect it gets better.
• Purity by Jonathan Franzen: I’ve only ever previously read The Corrections so I’m not exactly a JF fanboi but I did actually enjoy this one too.  Very modern and relevant plot, kind of dark comedy, enjoyable read.  Girl with mysterious past gets involved in an international conspiracy, but not what you might expect.
• The Prague Cemetary by Umberto Eco: This was a difficult book to like if for no other reason that the main character is an anti-semitic lunatic with multiple personalities who is personally responsible for developing the concept that the Jews should be eliminated via The Final Solution and he is NOT Hitler, he’s an earlier fictional character in the late 1800’s.  I hated him throughout the book and at the end when the author stated that he was the only fictional character in the book and the rest of the stuff actually happened it made me kinda ill.  As usual with Eco, it was enthralling and you couldn’t turn away, but still…
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: Sometimes with Pynchon I can get into the book and even enjoy it by the end, and sometimes I am just thinking “dude, wtf?”  This book was the latter.  I will be honest, I didn’t go to the end.  I got 2/3rds done, wondered why I was bothering, and abandoned the read.  WWII intrigues around a guy who has been conditioned to get a boner whenever a rocket is about to strike.  Ha ha, except, not really.  Weird but not enjoyably so.  I have read Mason and Dixon, Inherent Vice, The Crying of Lot 49, I basically know what I’m getting myself into with TP, but still, this one just didn’t do it for me and I bailed.
• Fight Club 2 (Graphic Novel) by Chuck Palahniuk: I had no idea there was a FC2 or that it was a graphic novel until I ran into it at a bookstore in Marquette MI a couple weeks ago.  Color me intrigued. Devoured it in one sitting and I have to say I enjoyed it until the end where I felt it got a little too clever, a little too deus ex machina, a little too silly.  Would it stop me from recommending?  No.  Would I re-read it?  Almost certainly.  I loved Fight Club, both the book and the movie, and I have loved some other books by this author, so, sure, why not?
• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick:  I love me some Dick.  Seriously.  (Shush, you.)  He’s a great writer who strikes a really great balance between unique ideas, entertaining writing, relevant and thought-provoking concepts, and frankly, being funny.  His books are always weird and worth it.  ASD is no exception.  A story about a cop who gets involved in the use of a drug called Substance D (aka Slow Death), it’s really a disturbing, sometimes funny, very strange exploration of drug culture.  Normally I shy away from stuff like that.  I am not a fan of Trainspotting.  But in this case, well, I can see why this is one of his more popular and better known works.  And speaking of Dick… 
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick:  Immediately before I read ASD I read The Three Stigmata… and everything I said above applies but perhaps it’s even more bizarre.  ASD goes into a drug culture that is more like opiate addiction but T3SOPE is more like LSD, with Barbie dolls, and pottery, and space colonies, and aliens, and religious symbolism, and…  well…  Just read the damn thing.  You’ll see what I mean.  Perky Pat my ass…
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline:  I didn’t see the movie but after reading the book I would sure like to.  What a fun read.  Probably the most entertaining full-length descent into 80’s geek culture ever, in which everything from John Hughes movies to Zork is relevant and the stakes are high no matter how basically silly the core concept is.  I don’t care whether it makes sense, I had fun.  Let’s all live in a lifelike virtual world in which everything is possible and spend our lives fetishizing 8-bit video games as if Joust has some sort of ultimate value.  Why not?  It’s fun.  At least, as a book it is.
• The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean: God I loved this book.  Did you know that you can buy spoons made of gallium that appear to the casual observer to be standard metal spoons but dissolve in hot tea?  No you didn’t.  Except you, James.  I know you knew that because you’re you.  But the rest of ya…  This book tells a story about each element in the period table and it’s just fascinating reading.  Doesn’t hurt that the writer is funny either.  Highly recommend.  Especially if you like Mark Kurlansky’s work (Salt, Cod). 
• Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh: You are here.  Science has gone through a fairly massive effort to try to figure out how that happened.  This is the story of the path that lead to the current best understanding and it isn’t what you think.  Somebody didn’t just say “Big Bang, we don’t need no stinking God, Darwin FTW!!!”   There is a long and fascinating backstory and many many people who contributed and Simon Singh tells the story very well.  Read this book, and then The Disappearing Spoon.  They actually go quite well together.

I could keep going, there are a few more recent reads worth sharing.  Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly and and A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier both come to mind, but other than saying they are both quite good, I’ll leave off here.  Maybe I’ll do this again as I read more books.  Maybe…

Two years ago, in July, I bought a blue 1978 Fiat 124 Spider 1800 convertible for $300.  It was cheap and looked very pretty from the outside.  Unfortunately, it was, to put it mildly, a mess.  There were plants growing in it.  The floor was a hole.  Animals had lived in it.  The top and interior were rotted away.  But, I didn’t care.  I have had a crush on the Fiat Spider since I was a kid and I had never owned a classic convertible of any kind or in any condition so bringing home an old dead one was still inspiring.  Plus, I wanted to learn how to restore cars.  The best way to learn is to do, and here was my entry into auto restoration school.

From that first Spider I learned how to strip a car and I learned the complete anatomy of a Fiat Spider.  I sourced the engine, transmission, a lot of the sheet metal, doors, you name it, and most of that car is in my barn now, but once I had taken everything of value from the car, I scrapped the remaining chassis.  It was no longer cute at that point.  Sad…

Spider number two was a brown 1980 Spider 2000 and was even cheaper ($200) than the first Spider.  It was also in better condition.  Missing some sheet metal (rear fender panels) and not currently running, but definitely workable.   Solid underneath.  No plants.  Unfortunately, Spider number two had an automatic transmission paired to a lower performance rear differential.  However, a resto plan for Spider number two started to take shape and it involved transplanting the transmission, drivetrain, and rear axle sourced from the 1978 Spider.  I even considered ignoring the drivetrain swap, just focusing on the body, and doing an electric vehicle conversion.  

While still mulling over options I kept tinkering with both cars, practicing my sheet metal work, reading books, building my confidence, and I also kept a Craigslist search alert up for anything related to Fiat Spiders.  I snagged some red interior pieces, a few extra transmissions, and other random Spider parts but a couple weeks ago one of the things I had really been hoping for showed up, namely, a hardtop.  Spider hardtops are rare as hen’s teeth and I was super stoked to find one, but amazingly, this one just so happened to have a whole Spider attached to it and that is how I found the Spider I didn’t know I had been looking for all this time.

Spider number three, a flame-red 1980 Spider 2000, cost me more than the other two put together ($1700) but it’s a legitimate barn find and a much better restoration candidate than either of the first two.  Here’s a little biography.

I bought this Spider from a 76-year-old gentleman who bought the car secondhand back when it was relatively new in the mid-1980s.  After painting it red (it was originally green) and putting a couple thousand miles on it, the transmission conked out on him and he put it in storage intending to fix it.  He got as far as removing and disassembling the old transmission but then he must have gotten distracted for the next 29 years because that was 1989, judging by the title and plates and it still doesn’t have a transmission in it.  Everything else, however, is in great condition.  A few spots of rust here and there, but generally speaking, it’s in fine shape.  None the worse for being in a 29 year induced coma.  

The restoration has already begun.  First things first, get a title for a car that was last licensed and plated in the 80’s.  Done.  Secondly, sort out a complete transmission with no obvious problems.  Done.  I have no idea if the transmission I am going to install will actually work well, because I’ve never tested it in a car, but if it doesn’t, I have others to choose from.  Next up, install the transmission and mov on to getting the engine ready for a test fire.  If this engine really hasn’t run in 29 years that might take a bit of doing.  Probably more than just throwing gas in it and turning the key.  Once I have a running engine and adequate transmission I will have a running resto, which is exciting as hell.  I plan to do body work over the course of the winter and (hopefully) by spring to have it ready for a paint job.  It’s going to go black, with a red interior.  It’s also going to get the earlier style chrome bumpers.  

What about Spider #2, the brown one?  Well, thanks to Spider #1 I have enough parts and replacement sheet metal lying around to restore that one as well, and now it’s obvious: electric conversion!  Brown Spider is going electric.  Oh yeah.  

I’ll see you on the roads next year in one of my Spiders…  I have no intention of buying more.  🙂

Last night I went to the My Bloody Valentine show and this was my evening.

I arrive about 7:00, Michael is running late. As I’m driving to the show, a few blocks from Palace Theater, Jan Witte crosses the street in front of me. I roll my window down and yell “Hey Jan!” and he stops, looks confused for a second, recognizes me, and says “You going to the Palace?” and I laugh and say “Yeah, I’ll see you there!” and he keeps running.

I don’t actually see him there at any point in the evening but I assume he enjoyed the show.

I wait around outside for a bit, people are mingling, very trendy crowd. There is a guy in a Sub Pop shirt. Another guy wearing a RIDE shirt. A lot of thick plastic glasses and beards. I don’t really see anybody I know except there is this midget woman who looks very much as if she is a meth head running around asking people for “two dollars” and they keep turning her down. I recognize her, she was doing the same in the Burger King parking lot while I was eating breakfast one day and she knocked at my car door window and I gave her some money. I don’t have any money to give her this time but it doesn’t stop her from asking me about six times.

I have to pee so I go into the Palace and use the restroom and then get stamped for readmission and go back outside to wait. I’m too excited to play on my phone or really do much of anything except stand there fiddling with the hearing protection I brought. Over lunch I made a stop to buy some good earplugs for concert listening because I didn’t want to lose my hearing or wear the foam ones. I text Michael, Jill has finally showed up to pick up the boys, his Uber driver is stuck in traffic thanks to the construction on 35W, I tell him I’ll wait inside for him. I don’t want to be too far back. He says that’s great but then asks me if I have a copy of his ticket in electronic form. I presume I do because it was an eTix purchase and I tell him I’ll send it to him.

I go into the theater and head to front left of stage where I immediately see Eric Elvendahl sitting down and we start kibitzing. He tells me about his new job replacing meters that he and Reed helped install 12 years ago. I tell him he is looking great, and he really is. He has lost weight, and he looks healthy and happy. I think that’s pretty awesome. I struggle to find my tickets in my email archive. Eric helps me recall them through the eTix website and pretty soon I have Michael’s ticket on my phone screen. I take a screenshot and send it to him.

Eric gets up to use a bathroom or something, I go to get a drink or something, and when I get back to the spot I’ve lost him. The opener comes on and they seem damn familiar but I don’t know why. Part of me thinks they must be MBV because they seem familiar and I have no idea what MBV looks like these days. I don’t recognize any of the songs, so I am unsure. I text Michael that there is no opener and MBV is on. By the third song I realize I’m wrong and I’m texting him a correction when he appears to my right so instead I just tell him I’m an idiot.

Michael has forgotten his ID and has black X’s of shame on both of his hands so I go get him a beer and get myself a G&T. Michael is afraid to drink while the house lights are up. He’s been waiting 25 years to see MBV, he isn’t about to miss his chance now over a beer. This is all fine and dandy with me. We make small talk about things I can’t even remember, and mostly we just watch them setup the stage for the big show. Michael tells me they have been having problems with false starts on this tour, and sure enough, when MBV take the stage they fumble the opening of the first song and have to start again. It’s the only fumble of the night and for the next seemingly several hours, I am lost in a wave of sound that physically causes my bones to tremble. There is very little in the way of stage banter or talk. There are no intelligible words sung. Just a fury, an ocean, a relentless dream of sound. Bilinda Butcher stands on the left of the stage, playing a succession of glittery Fender Mustang guitars and looking to all the world like a prim and proper librarian who just happens to be in the loudest, most revered, shoegaze rock band in the world. She has no stage mannerisms other than to stand still and play and sing with a little grin on her face like she cannot believe she’s still doing this at 56 either. Debbie Googe on the bass is much more dynamic. She spends the set living in the music, bobbing up and down and rocking her bass while keeping her back mostly to the audience and playing to the drummer, Colm Ó Cíosóig, center. At stage right, the legendary Kevin Shields makes things happen with his guitar that I cannot follow. I don’t understand how these four individuals are creating the sound that is assaulting my body with the tools at their disposal. It seems impossible but it is also so real, so visceral, that there is no questioning it for long.

During what turns out to be the final song of the night, the entire concept of melody or music disappears and they explode into a wall of solid, impenetrable, noise, the worlds biggest waterfall pounding in your ears during the demolition of the worlds biggest city, if I had fillings, they would be vibrating out of my teeth, it is the last musical, most discordant, loudest, sound I’ve ever experienced. 100 jumbo jets blasting their engines into your face at once. I stand in the sound, I resonate, people around me hold their arms up in spiritual ecstasy, I lose track of time, does it last 1 minute? 2? 5? 8? I really don’t know. It lasts longer than it has any right to do but I want it to last forever. I feel my feet leaving the ground, I feel my ribcage juddering, shaking cobwebs and darkness from out of my heart, who knew that noise could have this spiritual effect? Who knew that an assault of sound was just what was needed?

When the song ends, I slowly feel the earth beneath my feet again. The band leaves the stage. There is no banter, no encore, no toying with the crowd. They’ve come, they’ve played, they’re leaving now. The house lights rise. Nobody questions it, nobody complains, the crowd starts to file out.

I tell Michael my brother is probably here. During the show I have sent him some messages via Instagram, the only way I know how. I go to the restroom. I see Eric Skogen while I wait in line. At least I hope it’s him because I say hello. He is beardier than I remember him. It turns out that I am correct as I learn in a couple minutes. Eventually I am on the sidewalk in front of the theater with Chad Rhigher, Eric Elvendahl, Eric Skogen, Mindy Rhigher, Cam Kloekman(?), Michael, and a few others. Rhiger tells me that Reed is behind me. Michael says we should go say Hi. I don’t really want to at first but when he threatens to go over there without me I decide, what the hell. I walk up from behind him and give him a big hug and say into his ear “You may not like this, but I love you brother”

He turns and grins and there he is, my little brother, now 41 years old, Balder, but not as bald as me, greyer, but not as grey. We talk, I feel no tension. We haven’t spoken in at least years and the last time we spoke was bad. But this night we are brothers again for a few moments. We discuss Triumph cars and outboard boat motors. He offers me some spare parts. The feeling of total normalcy is the weirdest aspect of the situation.

Eventually we all go our own ways. I drop Michael off and drive through Taco Bell on the way home. When I arrive, the house is quiet, everyone is asleep. I tuck myself in and drift off to peaceful dreams. In the morning, I wake when the sun rises, I put on a pot of coffee. I get ready for work, I take the bus into Minneapolis, I write this journal entry and listen to MBV and smile.