Walk, man

And just like that, a month goes by between updates. Somehow it never feels like it's that long away... and then it is.

So, I'm back, in some capacity anyway, and hoping to put the newly-freed time to better use than what I've been doing lately, which is loafing and playing way too much pinball. The weekly library walk is a good sanity-maintainer, as it's something to look forward to in the work week and good exercise for the largely sedentary lifestyle of someone who makes his living behind a keyboard. Our library system has a number of branches and a particularly excellent online system for reserving books and having them ready for pickup at any branch. I don't know if this is the norm now, but it's incredibly convenient.

That cassette collection (of questionable taste) lived in one of those huge zippered nylon cases under the bed in my dorm room, and was fed at first thanks to the largess of the back catalog of the BMG Music Club (12 albums for a penny!), by careful duplication of friend's cassettes, and then in years later, by legging it to the library to riffle through their CDs. Some of those old albums are permanently embedded in my brain with the place, so (for example) the tape I made that backed Naked Lunch with Different Trains automatically takes me back to a late-night drive across central Indiana to pick up a friend from the airport. Some of the more regrettable 80's pop songs are instant time-travel back to college years, walking around the pond near campus just as autumn was turning and all the sugar maples dropping continual showers of orange and yellow leaves. (This ink color is close, but nowhere as vivid.)

Scent is a powerful memory-trigger, but I think music is an actual time machine for your brain.

Heavy Metal Lifestyle

Typed with a 1958 Olympia SM-3 (italic)

More Mingo

Two weeks until NaNo lift off everyone... are you ready for some Hard Work?

A little music should help those fingers fly: just remember the admonition not to oil the segment of your typewriter, or this might happen...



The rings... the suit... and now the shoes! This man is my typing-fashion hero (sorry Olivander.)

Lazy Blogging: Musical Type

OK typeonauts, someone find this guy and sign him up for a theme song:

• Typewriter modded for music (via MAKE magazine)

Seriously: get this guy on board.

And although Geeksugar has endorsed typewriter-key "jewelry" in the past, there's no denying that I want one of these for my ancient craptop. Wonder if they come in AlphaSmart size?

Sounds Wonderful

Right now, stop what you're doing and listen. Hear anything?

If you're at home, you're probably surrounded by various neighborhood sounds. The springtime sounds in my suburb are made by the swarms of lawn-care crews running ungodly leaf blowers, chasing invisible clippings into adjoining yards for their service to clean up. (Does no one besides me mow their own grass these days?) If you're in an office, you've likely got the drone of some air-moving machinery, a slight hum from your computer and the light fixtures, and maybe some traffic noise if you're lucky enough to be placed near a window. What's it sound like by you, right now?

Personally, I can't handle silence. I need something happening in the background to work, and at least since college, that "something" has been music, supplied then by hauling my Walkman and a couple of cassettes down to an isolated study carrel, and now by CDs piped through my computer's speakers. Even having the volume down low is better than no sounds at all. And I've added a thrift-store travel alarm clock to the mix -- mechanical, of course -- just for the steady tick-tick-tick it makes in the background. I need this noise, to keep me grounded in the real world. Coding datbases is a solitary, silent existense, and I guess I need a little reminder where I really am when my head is full of tables and queries and joins.

There's a discussion going now on one of the mailing lists about musical typewriters: not typewriters that make music, but that are designed for printing it onto the page. Maybe what I need here is my own typewriter music -- a regular click-tap-click of a machine being put through its paces, measuring and marking off ideas like this little clock measures off the seconds. Sounds wonderful to me. Anyone up for sitting nearby and providing me with a little mechano-musical accompanyment? The pay's not great, but the audience is rapt.

100 Years of Insanity

Today marks what would have been the hundredth birthday of musician/inventor Raymond Scott, familiar to anyone (like me) who grew up watching far too many Warner Brothers' cartoons. Scott was the musical inspiration for many of Carl Stalling's arrangements, and Scott's original tunes are glibly named, reflecting jazz age sensibilities with -- I suspect -- an impish sense of humor. Scott was a pioneer in early electronic music, literally filling the walls of his home studio with his own creations. I envy and admire both his musical chops and his tinkering talent, and note with some sadness that only posthumously is he being recognized and re-discovered.

Scott was also a bit of a perfectionist. Listening to one of the "bonus" tracks on the Microphone Music albums, you can hear a candid recording of him drilling his ensemble's clarinetist through a complicated passage in "Powerhouse," repeating the same sequence of notes again and again. Without the sheet music in front of me, I honestly have a hard time determining what's wrong with the performance; is he muffing the intonation? The dynamics? Considering that the passage in question practically flies by when played at-tempo, I think it's very telling to listen to Scott semi-patiently drill the clarinetist over... and over... and over... seeking that perfect passage. No wonder he went into electronic and mechanical music: adjustments could be made by setting a dial or flipping a relay.

I certainly see a lot of myself in this, not coincidentally because my own meager compositions sound very Scott-like to me, especially when held up against his later all-electronic stuff. He and I seemed to take the opposite paths, though: immersed in human imperfection, Scott embraced the clean precision of the machine in his work, whereas I'm looking to muddy up my work with a little lower-tech imperfection, embracing the ink bottle and the typo.

Happy Birthday, Raymond. Hope you found perfection in the end.