revision99

What have I done with my life?

Or maybe I should ask what has become of my life, because it seems to have slipped away. Oh, I’m healthy, but that’s just a technical matter. I’m not talking about the strength of my body, but the condition of my soul. I have made a lot of compromises, and I am trapped in the consequences, and now I look around and I wonder if it has been worth it. It’s gotten to the point that I’m afraid even to say what I want in my life, afraid that I will seem foolish, impractical, a dreamer. I’m running like the fox in a hunt, and the hounds are closing in. Will it end with me in a tree, paralyzed, or will I find an escape?

At this moment, I don’t know. And this is all before the real darkness of winter has set in.

I have been — God help me — listening to Top 40 radio.

Top 40 radio. That’s what it used to be called. I’m not sure what they call it today, although I am pretty sure they don’t have 40 songs on the playlist.

See, I was reading the other morning in the Los Angeles Times about the competition between hit radio stations in LA — it seems the upstart Amp Radio (KAMP-FM) is giving the reigning champion (KIIS-FM) a run for the ratings money. Who cares, really, but the story made me start wondering just what it is the kids are dancing to these days, so in the car on the way to work I turned on KAMP-FM.

Apparently everything’s hip hop now. I heard a bunch of commercials, a DJ yelling really loud and really fast and really loud, and then a song called “Hotel Room,” by Pitbull. Ginormous beat, speaker-rippin’ bass, cheesy synth line, misogynist lyrics:

“…after party in the hotel lobby,
then we off to the room like vroom! put them fingers in your mouth uh open up your blouse and pull that g-string down south oooo!”

And the chorus, repeated 5,000 times:

“Forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room, you can bring your girlfriends and meet me at the hotel room.
Forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room, you can bring your girlfriends and meet me at the hotel room.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.
We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn.”

It’s actually quite infectious in a brain dead, purely physical sort of way. I turned the bass all the way up in my car, but I have a feeling the stock Honda sound system wasn’t designed for that kind of thing, and I didn’t get the full effect. Still, infectious.

I only listened to KAMP-FM for ten minutes, and that’s what I heard. Then on the way home from work, I turned it on again, and guess what was playing? That’s right, say it with me — “We at the hotel, motel, holiday inn…” True, it was nine hours later, but I’ll bet it was more than a coincidence. I’ll bet they play that song and about eight others every hour, all day, every day.

I am a musician, and I perform in public, but I have to tell you that I will not make myself ridiculous by trying to sing this song, or any of the stuff they are playing on the hit stations. I take seriously the obligation to be entertaining, but there have to be boundaries for a man of my age. I’m just exploring, like an explorer, the Indiana Jones of intergenerational musicology. You know, taking notes.

Then the other night I’m flipping through a range of seldom-viewed channels up in the four hundreds on my Verizon FIOS fiberoptic entertainment pipe and I come across a show called “Talk Asia,” or something like that, which has one gorgeous non-asian woman interviewing another gorgeous non-asian woman. I love women, I really do, I don’t care if they’re asian or not, they are all gorgeous to me, and so I watch for a few minutes and it turns out the interviewee  is Lady Gaga, who looks like she is going to be the next Madonna. Researching this later I find this video on YouTube (WARNING: Banned in Australia!), and the very next time I turn on Amp Radio there she is! I have been listening to hit radio only a couple of days and already I know one of the big hit artists! I’m feeling so inside!

Anyway, if you’ve listened to “Hotel Room” you know pretty much what’s going on with the Top 40 these days. Gaga sings melodies and uses instruments and background singers, but 85 percent of the progamming sounds just like “Hotel Room.” To me.

One thing they are all doing, even Gaga, that they need to stop right away is using Auto-Tune on their voices. Auto-Tune is a digital technology that you can apply to audio. It detects the nearest “in tune” note to the one the singer is singing, and alters the singer’s pitch to match the “correct” pitch. If you think about it for a minute, you will see that while this could be a boon to a lot of vocalists, it also has the potential to take away all the nuance and character from a performance. Singers through the decades, from Billie Holliday to Mick Jagger to Bono do not necessarily nail all the notes, and in fact it is the “wrong” notes they sing that often give their performances their warmth, humanity, style, soul — whatever you choose to call it.

Auto-Tune could take that magic away, and that’s if you use it sparingly. That would be bad enough, but if you turn it up to extreme settings, it changes your voice to this. This seems to have started in 1998 with Cher’s huge hit “Believe.” OK, fine, it was a cool effect, but enough! Naturally, everybody on Amp Radio (and probably KIIS-FM, too) is overusing Auto-Tune, and the result is that all the singers kind of sound like the same singer. Also, the robot-voice thing gets old and irritating pretty quick, so knock it off. No, really.

I’m definitely going to try it the next time I get near a microphone, though.

Hooray, the recession is over!

Bankers on Wall Street have come up with a plan to save us all. Er, save the economy. Or maybe they are just trying to save themselves, but hey, the important thing is that at least they trying to help. According to this New York Times article dated September 5, 2009, here’s what they’re doing:

They are going to buy life insurance policies for pennies on the dollar from old people who have fallen on hard times and need some cash. Then they are going to bundle a whole bunch of these policies together and sell them on the market as sure-fire securities. What could possibly go wrong?

Does this sound familiar? Remember securitized mortgages? We all know how well that went. Everything was triple-A rated, of course, and yet somehow only a few bankers and brokers survived, while everybody else lost their shirts.

Of course there is no regulation of this proposed market at this time, and by the time the SEC or whoever gets around to that, the market will be — say it with me — too big to fail, and we’ll just have to live with it, and then later bail it out. And can anyone guess how long it will be before armies of salesmen start calling grandpa to let him know what a great deal they have for him on his silly old life insurance policy? I’ll guess: five minutes.

But there might be room here for some regulatory action. After all, once Grandpa sells his life insurance, the investors have to start hoping he will die sooner rather than later, because as long as Gramps is still kicking they have to keep paying the premiums on the policy, and they don’t get to collect the payout. Naturally they’ll want the old guy to sign a promise to die as soon as possible. This is where the government could step in and insist on end-of-life counseling first. These would be Death Panels Republicans could believe in.

So there you have it. The next brilliant idea, brought to you by the folks who gave you credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles and collateralized debt obligations.

Step right up, katz and kittenz, and place your bets.

It’s Sunday morning in my town, and I am doing the weekly grocery shopping –

– the farner’s market down by the marina, Whole Foods just across the street. I have to drop that stuff off at the house and then go to Trader Joe’s for the things it seems you can only get there, like gluten-free, wheat-free tortillas, and then Costco, for the 55-gallon drum of dish soap and the freight car full of toilet paper.

I am filled with wonder and awe and sadness and joy at this beautiful and fearsome universe, at the fires in the Angeles National Forest that thoughtlessly kill and destroy; at the woman sitting on the curb with her dog and her sign “Homeless Veteran, Any Help Appreciated”; at the half hour of Beatles in mono they just played on Breakfast With the Beatles; at the young man working st Whole Foods who spontaneously sang along in perfect falsetto with Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man”; at the red Ferrari I followed on the freeway all the way home from the store, suddenly realizing, after all these many years — “Hey! I want one of those!” — and thinking it’s OK to desire, to covet; at the way we are sliding from summer into fall, and the sun is washing the world in gold; at the friends I have known and lost, and the ones I haven’t yet met; at the brave and beautiful plumeria in the back yard, who brings forth a flower every now and then, in spite of our neglect most of the time; at my little cat Tigger, who stays in the house even when the door is open and unguarded, because he knows it’s what I want him to do — what love, to tame your own instincts to please another!

I’m not who I want to be, and my life hasn’t turned out as I expected, but some days, days like this, I am happy to be here, to be able to go outside and just…  see what’s there, feel the breeze, and sweat in this heat wave we’re having. I’m happy to have an extra day off my crummy job this week, happy to have my Telecaster and my Blackjack and my Fender Hot Rod Deluxe and the chance to play them in my band a few times a month.

Yes, katz and kittenz, I am Pollyanna, thanks.

In the 1960’s the Black Panthers upset the California political establishment by showing up at the state legislature armed to the teeth.

They didn’t shoot anybody. It was political theater designed to illustrate their point of view that “power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” Indeed.

It’s probably true that if you and I are in a serious dispute, and one of us has a loaded gun and seems willing to use it, that’s the one with the power, and the one most likely to “win” the argument.

But in the current national conversation (or screaming match) about improving our sick national health care system, logic, compassion, morality and the will of the people are no match for the weapon wielded by the medical-industrial complex:

Money.

Big pharma and the insurance companies have a lot of it, and they are throwing massive amounts of it into their effort to stop anything that might reduce their obscene profits. It’s working pretty well, as one liberal/progressive/Democratic proposal after another is removed from the discussion.

At the outset the one simple idea that is most likely to reduce cost, cover everyone and free us all from the indentured servitude of employer-provided insurance — universal government-run single-payer (or “Medicare for all”) — was simply taken “off the table,” with no discussion or debate whatsoever.

The Obama Administration fell back to advocating a “public option” plan, which would allow people to choose between their existing plan (if they even had one) and a public plan. The public plan would have been similar to Medicare, and would have operated without having to make a profit, which means it would have been less expensive by a wide margin. This was decried as a “government takeover” and is now not likely to make it into the final version of whatever reform bill is passed.

Next comes the notion of “insurance co-ops.” This is the worst idea so far, because co-ops are sort of ad hoc groups of consumers who band together and try to provide each other health insurance. They will not be able to compete against existing Big Insurance because it will take decades for them to get the membership necessary (an estimated 500,000) to spread the risk widely enough. In the meantime they will be snuffed out by the established industry.

And anyway, Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats in Congress are already saying they won’t vote for co-ops, either.

Here’s what I think, and I’m pretty sure I’m right: The corporations who stand to lose in any major reform of the health care system are simply paying to keep it from happening. They are able to legally bribe elected officials in the form of campaign contributions. And they are hiring media and PR consultants to confuse and frighten the electorate into demanding that the government “keep hands off my Medicare!” With their billions in cash they are able to control the debate from inception to the final vote in Congress. They don’t need guns. Their wealth is their power, and I am starting to wonder if there is any defense.

I mean, according to early polling Americans wanted universal single-payer health insurance by a margin of two to one. Now after a year of misinformation and specious arguments everyone is mixed up and angry and doubtful and suspicious, and if that’s not enough to turn the tide against reform, our elected officials have been given a a few hundred million dollars by the very industries they are expected to regulate, so how the hell do we expect them to behave?

_______________________________________________

Recommended reading (these guys say it so much better than I):

• Chris Hedges, This Isn’t Reform, It’s Robbery
• Paul Krugman, Missing Richard Nixon

For those of us who remember Camelot, this is a somber final moment.

Ted Kennedy was the last of the brothers, and the only one who got to live out his life. He screwed up a few times, but I believe he made up for those during his 40 years in the United States Senate. He was a champion of civil rights, Americans with disabilities, immigration reform and health care reform.

Born to privilege, he spent his life defending the vulnerable. We are better off as a people for the laws he wrote, sponsored, fought for and got passed.

So long, Senator. Thank you for your service.

Hope you like the new look of revision99.

I’ve changed to the “Elegant Grunge” template by Michael Tyson. A few days ago I updated my platform to the very latest version of WordPress (version 2.8.4), and became painfully aware that my old template — “Letterhead” by Robin Hastings — was simply too outdated to continue using. The WordPress community works tirelessly and endlessly to improve the platform, and those generous souls who develop and release templates for all of us non-coders to use sometimes get left behind. I loved the Letterhead template. It was clean and simple and easy to read. But the features that have been incorporated into the new WordPress are just not usable in the older templates, and most of us bloggers have neither the time nor the knowledge to update them ourselves.

So now I have this new look.

It will probably require some tweaking to get it working the way I want. The first thing I have to do is make this text black. The default color is some hip grayish color that probably pleases the designer’s eye, but, really, it’s a little hard to read, don’t you think? There will be other changes I will have to make, and they will come slowly since I will be figuring out how to edit the template as I go. So please bear with me, and also let me know if you find stuff in revision99 that is broken or doesn’t display correctly on your screen.

Thanks!

UPDATE: Text is now black. Woohoo.

Put on your thinking caps, katz’n'kittenz. Here comes a word problem!
[UPDATE: My solution appears in the comments below.]

Molly the Cat and Tigger live here in our house. They each came to live with us at different times, and of their own choosing. Those could be long stories, one of which I’ve already told here, so I’ll skip ahead to the math problem.

No sooner had they moved in than they started asking for food. Regular meals, and they were quite insistent about it. Being the good ex-hippies that we are, we took it upon ourselves to provide not just a tasty menu, but also excellent nutrition. It took a while, but we finally found a brand of canned food that they liked and that we thought was good for them, and no less than three brands of dry food (hereafter called “crunchies”).

Tigger is a boy, and a little bigger than Molly, and over time we figured out that he needed more food than Molly. No doubt he thought we were hopelessly stupid during the months it took us to come to this realization, but eventually we did, and here is how the daily diet eventually took shape: Breakfast is at 7:00 AM and dinner (”supper” to you Eastern seaboarders) is at 6:00 PM. At each seating, Molly gets one fifth of a can and Tigger gets one fourth of a can. Throughout the day and in the evenings both of them get all the crunchies they want. To make it easier to measure the fractions of cans, each critter eats only from his or her own can until it is empty, then moves on to the next can in the cupboard. So it takes four meals (or two days) for Tigger to empty his can, and five meals (or two and a half days) for Molly to do the same.

You wouldn’t think that both cans would be empty at the same time very often, would you? You’d be right. But for a long time I have had the feeling that that event (two cans empty at the same time — two fresh cans opened for the same meal) was happening a little too often. For about a year, I had that feeling. Somebody — either me or Mrs. Jones — was screwing up the measurements at feeding time. To be fair, it’s pretty hard to eyeball a fifth of a can, and both of us may have muffed it from time to time.

Last night we figured out exactly how often this should happen. I’m embarrassed to say that it took two college graduates a half hour to come up with the definitive answer, and even now we don’t understand it mathematically. How fast can you solve the problem?

Start with two full cans. Give Molly a fifth of her can at each meal, and Tigger a fourth of his can at each meal. Put plastic caps on them and refrigerate between meals. Whenever a can is empty, open a new one. How many days before you find yourself opening two new cans at the same time?

Go ahead and tell me the answer in the comments, if you can. We figured it out basically by running a model scenario all the way to the end, but there is also a mathematical formula that is much more elegant and sophisticated. Except I can’t figure it out and explain the “why” of it. So help me with that, too.

My answer will be posted soon.

I can’t believe I have all this stuff.

There was a time when owning all of it was just a dream. Now I am standing in my patio at three in the morning, and here it all is, staged between the garage and the house, waiting to be carried inside: A sweet all-tube Fender guitar amplifier, two fancy-assed electric guitars, a rack full of electronics, a couple of duffel bags full of electronic gizmos, miscellaneous adapters, microphones and cables. I lusted after most of this stuff the way some men pursue women, and now it’s just heavy equipment that I have to carry in the middle of the night, and put it somewhere secure, if such a place exists.

I had packed it up and loaded it earlier in the afternoon, hauled it to the bar where I was playing, unloaded it there, unpacked and set it up. Later, we broke it all down, packed it up again, loaded the cars, the truck and the van and brought it back, each of us, to our various homes, and now I was half way through the job of dragging it out of the car and into the house. That’s four times in one day. And did I mention there’s a whole PA system, too, with six speaker cabinets and heavy power amplifiers? Well, there is.

The band sounded kind of good this night. We have bumbled our way into a few gigs, and the extra playing time has sharpened our performance. I find myself turning to look in surprise and delight at the other guys when something, a transition or an ending or a complicated harmony happens just the way we’d rehearsed it.

The people are kind. They say “You guys are great!” They whistle and clap. Of course, they came to have a good time, they are all high in various ways, and they will enjoy themselves, no matter what we do.

But it’s not really a great band. No matter how hard we try, how long we practice, there is a frontier of “greatness” out there beyond the horizon, and really, we are just playing around the neighborhood, staying close to home, keeping our day jobs, our paychecks and medical insurance. Greatness demands a bigger commitment.

I complain privately about the flaws and the failings, but what we are doing is, we’re having great big rock’n'roll fun. At least I am. For those few hours when we’re on stage I’m as happy as I ever get. I stopped playing for money decades ago and only recently took it up again. But my attitude now is “I don’t need the money. I just want it to be offered.” Playing rock’n'roll with this band, any band, for real live people who are dancing and partying — I’d do that for free.

Moving all this equipment — that’s what I get paid for.

Last night in my dream I put out a murder contract on myself.

The “broker” and I conducted the transaction in his office, a storefront with thrift store furnishings. I told him I wanted someone to kill me, and I gave him the money. Then, since it was early evening and I was at loose ends, I went by myself to a movie.

I have no memory at all of the movie, but by the time I left the theater it was full nighttime and I no longer wanted to die. I couldn’t find the storefront, so I headed home, keeping a close eye in the rear view mirror. After a while I decided I was being followed, and I was gripped with fear. Whoever it was, I thought, it would be a pro, and I wouldn’t have a chance.

Home turned out to be a second floor apartment that in real life I haven’t lived in for more than ten years. When I got to my door at the top of the stairs I was shaking so badly that I couldn’t fit the key in the slot. While I was fumbling, the outside door opened at the foot of the staircase. Terrified, I fell on my back near the top few steps. A broad-shouldered guy with handsome features stepped into the entryway. He was not the guy I had contracted with. He was the killer.

I could barely get out the words “I changed my mind — I really did…” He smiled in a friendly way and gestured for me to wait for him, then he went back out the door. Before I could recover enough to run, he came back in. This time he came up a few steps and snapped open a long, efficient-looking knife, no nonsense, with a simple bronze-colored metal handle, slightly corroded.

He said it was OK, he didn’t have to kill me if I didn’t want him to, but he had to cut something off me, a body part to show the broker that he had done the job. Otherwise he wouldn’t get paid. I asked what he wanted, and he said he usually cuts off the victim’s hand. Left or right, either would be fine.

I thought of not ever being able to play guitar again. I suggested an ear, but he said that wouldn’t be good enough because he needed a fingerprint. I tried for the little finger on my right hand, but he wanted an index finger if he couldn’t have the whole hand. Which one could I do without?

While I was trying to decide, the first big jet of the day took off from the nearby airport and woke me up.