Author Archives: Judah

What’s this hell, what’s this pen

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So I owe a media post or two anyway, and this seems just about the perfect place for it:

My father, whose taste runs much more towards old style Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction, introduced me to the Foundation series when I was in fifth or sixth grade. He liked it because of the inredible tiny details Asimov imagined, like atomic ballpoint pens and atomic ashtrays and so on. I mostly liked it because it dealt with an entire universe, 25 billion inhabited worlds, full of nothing but people. People and their politics.

About ten years have passed since the last time I read the novels, so I decided to start over. I’m 80% through the sixth of seven, Foundation’s Edge, and I notice a lot of things now that I didn’t notice back when I was a teenager.

First: many of Asimov’s characters seem uncomfortable around women, and all of the books show their age. They were written in the fifties (at least the core three were), and they sound like they were written in the fifties, and the whole affair is one of awkwardness in space. It is very, very cute. See especially Hari Seldon’s flight in Prelude to Foundation, which is like someone working up the courage to ask Jenny to the winter formal.

Second: In the far future, 20,000 years hence, everybody smokes.

Third: Asimov spends a lot of time knocking down religion, but he takes the really easy way out, because we know in advance that all of the religions beliefs presented by the characters are patently false. It’s like being told that the sky is blue in chapter one, and then in chapter ten meeting a religion who believes that the sky is yellow, and ridiculing the character. Not satisfying and he could have done better. Even when he demonstrated the power of religion in Foundation, his religion of science is laughed at by everyone on the foundation who know it is a means of exploiting an ignorant populace.

All of that said, I still think the books are entertaining, and I still think it’s bold to imagine a universe full of nothing but humans* who deal with nothing but human problems.

Prelude to Foundation
Prelude to Foundation

Forward the Foundation
Forward the Foundation

Foundation
Foundation

Foundation and Empire
Foundation and Empire

Second Foundation
Second Foundation

Foundation's Edge
Foundation’s Edge

Foundation and Earth
Foundation and Earth

* (you know the exception, I’m not going to spoil it)

Typical

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When I accidentally leave winamp on repeat overnight, and The Amps jump up to 460 plays, that’s when the profile editor becomes unavailable. I mean, I like the amps, but not 400 plays in one week’s worth.

Roadtripping

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So I put together 6 CDs of mp3s for my trip up to Olympia and back, for something like 50 hours worth of music. I knew I only had 24 hours of driving to do, but I wanted to give myself some leeway. Unfortunately, I left them in my default encoding, which is a high quality VBR that comes out to the file-weight of 192kbps encoding (though, thanks to the magic of VBR, enjoys higher quality. It is one of LAME encoder’s options), and the mp3 software in my Mustang’s cd player didn’t handle that very well. It tended to cause skips and short silences at certain points in the music.

I started the trip with Deltron 3030, and listened to a fair amount of Frank Black on the way up. But the big winner on the trip up north was Magnolia Electric Co., and specifically the song The Dark Don’t Hide It, which I listened to probably 15 times in the state of Washington alone. It’s the good stuff.

While I was in Washington, I went to a local show featuring the debut performance of a band called Mechanical Birds, a set by Popoko Darling, and some loud guitar music from The Bride Wore Red. I ended up working the lights and recording the official bootleg (which I have yet to listen to, but apparently something did come out, to my surprise).

On the way back, it was an all-Mountain Goats show. There’s just nothing else remotely like them. But then, from my top artists list, that should be no surprise.

Next time, constant bitrate encoding.

Changing of the Guards

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So last week I finally paid tribute to the evil empire and opened an iTunes account. I didn’t want to, because I don’t have an iPod, and I want to be able to play music on my Zen Xtra, and my car stereo accepts mp3 CDs, but those two Frank Black albums finally overwhelmed me.

My favorite track on Snake Oil is Changing of the Guard, which is a cover of Bob Dylan‘s Changing Of The Guards. I’m inherently lousy at detecting when Frank Black is playing a cover, maybe because he plays them in his own way (for instance, when I heard him do Sister Isabel in concert, I had no idea it was a Del Shannon song) so I was curious to hear the original. And because I have iTunes now, that was just $0.99 away.

You can hear the elements of a good rock song in the original, but it’s buried under a flippant arrangement. Granted, it was recorded in 1978, and maybe that… is that reggae I hear… reggae organ was cutting edge, but I think it covers up some good, driving guitar that really comes out in the Catholics version.

Mind you, it’s not the night and day change that you’d get if you listened to the original version of Handyman.