general

I have a letter published in Camille Paglia's Salon column this week. (She's devoting every third column to reader mail.) It's probably suscription-only but here's the link. I was responding to an erroneous statement by another reader of hers, who claimed that George W. Bush (the Pres) had only lived in Texas beginning in high school (and a Houston suburban school at that) and therefore wasn't a true Texan. I thought it was widely known that Bush had grown up in Midland (my home town, too, till age 16). Midland is more cosmopolitan than surrounding towns such as Kermit or Notrees because of oil money but it's always been an arch-conservative bastion. Bush didn't just go native, he was born native.

Update, 2012: A commenter corrected both Paglia and me that Bush wasn't born in Midland. But he did grow up there, which was the point. Here's a comment I posted to that thread several years late:

Very late correction to my letter posted above: George W. Bush was born in New Haven CT but raised in Midland TX and later Houston (I said he was born in Midland - whoops). Since the substance of my letter was about his upbringing and not his first two years as a baby in Connecticut, am not sure why commenter E. Seco is so irate about the goof. (A friend googled "camille paglia" "tom moody" and Seco's gripe came up -- not my letter or this column.)

Spent some time today with the RMIV, a software drum machine that I've used off and on. An interesting feature--it's both a sampler and an analog-modeling live synthesis device; this distinguishes it from Native Instruments' Battery, which is all sampler.
Initially I was unimpressed with the live part 'cause the samples sounded better than the "real time" kits. But after about a year playing with hardware drum machines, I'm revising that judgment--when you tweak away from the presets you get some full-bodied, intriguingly distorted sounds. Turning knobs with a mouse isn't a tenth as much fun as twiddling real dials, and there's no way I'm going to use "MIDI learn" to assign a control surface to all these values, but I'm going to be patient and learn this thing. Using the hardware boxes gave me some good ideas for sequencing virtually, as well.
The computer I mainly use for music caught a Bill Bug and I spent about half the day wiping the drive. I actually like doing that--everything I value is backed up and it allowed me to get rid of some mistakes that were clogging up the machine (some of which couldn't be uninstalled otherwise)--as in, anything with a dongle. God I hate those things.
The Sony VAIO has a system recovery that boots from a space on the drive (or separate drive), as opposed to discs. It all worked. However Sony tech support ominously warns you that if you attempt to boot from the computer a second time, an irremediable error "may" occur so I followed their recommendation and burned a set of "recovery discs" from the same drive.
I'm really enjoying using the computer without all the crap on it. It's just one percussion synthesizer, a softsynth, Photoshop, and about 59 security updates from Windows.

Update: Oy, well it wasn't a virus, unless it's one that survives the complete overwriting of the C drive and reinstallation of the operating system and software. The computer just dies in the middle of something and restarts--I've had it happen with mp3 playback, while watching a movie, or creating audio in Cubase. Never while websurfing or using other programs--it only happens when playing/generating sound or video. This is a year old VAIO. Since practically nothing is on the computer now, the culprits are anitivirus (unlikely because I have an identical suite running on another, trouble free computer), something happening when the machine tries to go into sleep mode (I've just turned that off) or possibly some weird feedback with the soundcard (I've never had a spot of trouble in a year of using this card). One of the great things about going commentless is I don't have to listen to Mac owners extolling the virtues of their product in this type of situation--that's never been helpful in the past. Any suggestions from a sympathetic PC owner would be appreciated, via email or by leaving a comment on one of the other blogs. --tm

Update 2: Thanks to the reader who emailed helping me troubleshoot. He thinks it might be the cpu overheating or a short in the firewire card. But the computer is brand new, and wasn't cheap! Woe is me. I will try another outboard firewire soundcard I have, using both the 6 pin and 4 pin firewire ports (on opposite sides of this computer). It's starting to feel like the years when I drove an old car--is it the alternator, the voltage regulator, or the battery? I'm so glad I bought new gear so I wouldn't have to spend my hours doing this.

Update 3: The culprit appears to be a Maxtor external hard drive. I keep it turned off now except when doing backups.

I posted a comment to Digby's blog questioning the "Bush blowing up frogs" story, told by an ostensible childhood friend of Bush's and frequently cited by the Democratically inclined as evidence of Bush's early sadism. My comment appears to have been deleted (maybe I should have announced my left wing bona fides first).
I grew up in Midland, TX where springtime frogs were an interesting desert anomaly and someone was always telling stories about someone they knew blowing them up with firecrackers.
I'm not saying Bush isn't sadistic but this is weak anecdotal evidence--there are better examples.
Update: Digby kindly responded to my email and thought my comment's disappearance might have been a Haloscan error.

I have been accused of "baiting" people into arguments about Apple* but I'm posting this because my Quicktime updater--installed for security reasons after QT developed some virus vulnerability--just prompted me again, with an invasive pop-up, asking me did I really, really, really, not want to install iTunes?
Microsoft at its worst was never this aggressive about using the customer's own computer to market a product.
Hey, Jobs, stick iTunes up your 10th summer home!

*Like I really want to discuss it, and it's a moot point since this blog has comments turned off.

A remark below implying that keyboard players might be wasting the Receptor multi-plug in module was inspired by one of the demos on the Receptor site, a video of a professional "keyboard whiz" playing different patches and mostly showing off his fast, Rick Wakeman-esque fingering techniques. He says "here's an organ" or "here's a glitchy electronica sound" and proceeds to play the same type of riff, each with a different state of the art timbre.

In the movie Moog Herb Deutsch recalls that, in the early stages of designing a portable music synthesizer, Vladimir Ussachevsky recommended that Robert Moog not add a keyboard, because he felt that would encourage playing the instrument in a traditional way, as opposed to discovering new sounds it was capable of. That observation was prescient since most players went on to use the Moog as a kind of spacy organ. And they still are: the fellow in the demo has this powerful box packed with elaborate soundware (including Reaktor and all its DIY instruments) and he's using it to play prog licks.

I wonder if Duchamp's phrase "stupid as a painter" might also apply to musicians who think mainly with their hands.