Keith Handy 1.999

Open letter to Republicans

By now, I’ve read several hundred of your comments and blog posts, and watched the Republican YouTube debates. I want to be informed as to your side of the issues, and your rationale, but I’m afraid it’s not coming through. I really do have an open mind, and I really am listening. All I’ve heard from any of you so far is insults, name-calling, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, re-hashed McCarthyism, and that the sky is generally falling. (The Republican candidates themselves restrain themselves a little more carefully than you, for image management reasons; but that would hold true for any party, and I’m addressing you, the ordinary “people on the street”, who aren’t under that pressure.)

I’ve heard from you that whenever we vote for a Democrat — which, as long I’ve been alive, has been one of our two most realistic choices at every presidential election, and our only realistic option if we don’t like the Republican candidate — we’re voting against everything this country stands for, voting away freedom, and voting in communism, high taxes, moral decay, and general chaos. Basically, anyone who doesn’t vote Republican is anti-American. This implies to me that you don’t believe in voting. If you think that’s not a logical conclusion for me to draw, then please explain to me the point of having elections if, as far as you can see, there’s only ever one valid candidate. There are plenty of countries who hold elections when, in fact, the leader is pretty much already chosen. Is that what you want?

I’ve also heard that every time we have had a Democrat in office, the country has fallen apart. I’ve lived through several of these terms and don’t remember seeing the country falling apart. Do you have photographs of this fallen-apart-ness to show me and possibly refresh my memory? I was probably looking in the wrong direction at the time. Maybe “fallen apart” to you means that you heard stories on TV about people doing things you personally wouldn’t do, like having weird sex and not getting arrested for it. No, seriously, explain to me how it adversely affected your life, or the life of somebody you know. Explain to me how things got better for you or your loved ones every time a Republican took the wheel again.

Not only have you said nothing to persuade or inform me as a 38 year old, but even as a seventh grader I could have told you that you aren’t apparently making any real, convincing points. All you’ve convinced me of is that you hate a lot of people.

I’ve never checked off the “liberal” or “democrat” boxes on any questionnaire asking me what my political leanings are; I’ve always considered myself apolitical and open-minded. But you’re giving me the impression that this is less about political ideology and more about low IQ, lack of maturity, or common spite. I will flat-out be the first to tell you there are plenty of liberals and democrats who don’t write maturely or intelligently, and yes, there is a signal-to-noise ratio to contend with. The difference is, with Republicans, there’s no signal.

If you just need help translating your noble ideals into coherent sentences, maybe you can hire some of us commie liberals (your word for non-Republicans) as literary consultants to write it up for you. It would be kind of like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, except we’d be helping you with words instead of haircuts.

I like debates. I like intellectual challenges. I like to mull over opposing viewpoints. It’s not fun or challenging to choose between a viewpoint and a bunch of primitive chest-thumping. Please don’t make it so easy for me.

First “final” mix of Rival Big Bang

“Final” because all the things are there that are supposed to be there. “First” because they never are, are they?

My ears are toast. Enjoy if possible. :)

So you want to make… something that’s “dead”

The good news is, not everybody takes glee in the album being “dead”.

John Lennon was only ever interested in singles. Paul McCartney was the one pushing to segue tracks together to build longer suites. But neither was right or wrong; it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping. What’s “dead”, if anything, is the need to bend your ideas in an inauthentic way to conform to a physical format. But even physical media itself isn’t “dead”.

We call something “dead” when a bubble bursts. (It’s our spiteful way of celebrating the decline of something that has been popular and ubiquitous, but maybe not a good fit for us individually.) A bubble is something that is bigger than it should be, or bigger than it normally would be, and as a result, can’t be sustained as it is. However, when a bubble pops, the material that made it up still exists; it only ceases to be artificially inflated, reverting to its real and natural size.

There may no longer be a trend of people making albums who weren’t interested in albums in the first place. If you are interested in albums, though, that’s good news for you; when the people who came to the party for the wrong reasons finally leave, that’s when the party becomes fun again.

Oh, and don’t forget all the other things that “died”: acoustic pianos, real drums, the orchestra, radio, live performance… seems to me like most things do quite well after they “die”.

Mixer’s Block on Hometracked

I could very easily find myself posting a link to every single article on hometracked.com. Although there’s been a slump in posting volume over the past few months, they seem to be steadily posting again for now.

Ever heard or used the phrase “mixer’s block“? I haven’t, but I think it’s a great phrase. When you’re mixing, you’re painting a sonic picture. If you try to bring more focus to one element of the picture, the context of all the other elements gets thrown off, and you get yourself in a perpetual tug-of-war between, say, trying to make the drums cut through more solidly and keeping some keyboard part “full” and “present” sounding (my own off-the-top-of-my-head example). Often the solution is somewhere in left field; changing some third thing you hadn’t thought of somehow magically solves the first two, but you need to think creatively in order to get there.

I don’t have time to elaborate on this further at the moment, which is probably a good thing. Class dismissed.

YouRadio

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was saying “if only video was as standardized as audio”. At the file format level, it’s still relatively true; you can talk about OGG, MP4, FLAC, and so on, but ultimately, there’s no such thing as a person out there who can’t listen to an mp3… whereas, if you’re making a video, and want to send it to everyone in the world, good luck.

But the file format level is no longer the hurdle. At the web level, the problem is pretty much the opposite. You can put up as much video as you want on YouTube, it costs nothing, the sound and picture quality aren’t bad enough to make it unwatchable, and everybody basically knows what YouTube is, how to embed it, how to promote on it, and so on. For everyone but the high-def snobs, video delivery has been solved for some time.

Not so for plain audio. We can find free hosting for the files, but to present them in a “ready to play” format requires figuring out where to put them. And, as I’ve recently learned, figuring out how to make them available to humans only…

In the big picture, this may not be a bad thing.

Although my first instinct is to ask, well, why the hell don’t we have an audio equivalent of YouTube? Something like a “YouRadio” or whatever… okay, well suppose we did. Suppose there was such a thing.

I would hate it.

I can tell you that right now, in full certainty. Why? Because I’ve always hated music culture, and the whole “promo” activity scene. Get your band heard, get your band discovered, get your band ranked higher, get your band this and that… spend more and more time playing this like a game, and less time exploring the creative act of navigating unknown musical waters. And that’s exactly what a YouRadio would be. Promo-noise. The only people interested in bands are other bands, and the only reason they’re interested is because of what they think they can get for themselves by association.

Music, at a fundamental level, is a genuine thing that happens to a person. A person hears some music, a person is affected by the music. If anything else is happening — supporting your friends because you like them as people, etc. — it’s phony.

I’m here to create, not to compete. Trying to rise to the top in a heap of artists all trying to rise to the top is scarcity-minded. Engaging in this sport reinforces the tiny prize-to-contestant ratio as a reality, unnecessarily. Rather than seeing myself as one of millions of musicians, I see myself as one of only one: me. There is no other me. I don’t have to compete with anyone else to be myself. The noise everyone else is making is their problem, not mine. (Not that you’re all making “noise” individually — just collectively.)

But I digress. Since there is no “YouRadio”, I can stop bitching about how awful it hypothetically is. And suppose it did exist, and was useful, and free, and gave you an easy way to embed all your songs in flash players such that you would be rewarded rather than penalized for accruing plays over time. What features would I want it to have? Well, maybe it would be nice if it could display lyrics. Or production notes. Or some kind of images associated with the songs…

(Thanks to Heather for having a baby for the sole purpose of illustrating the parent-child relationship between necessity and invention.)

So, like, it would be audio… but with video. In other words, maybe the ideal “YouRadio” would simply be YouTube.

So now, I wouldn’t be making videos just to promote the audio; the videos would be the audio delivery. Out of necessity. And the fact that there’s anything to look at on the screen will just be a bonus.

First goal: get one song up from each album. The “music videos” don’t need to be any slicker than the session videos… just be imaginative.

And at least now I’d be doing it for a tangible reason.

I bought some paper.

I feel a little healthier than I did yesterday.

It also lifted my spirits to buy some colored paper today. If I knew exactly what I was going to do with it, you’d be the first to know. Well, no, actually, you’d be the second, because I’d be the first.

And if words aren’t enough for you, here I am in the picture shows, telling you the exact same thing. Roll ‘em!