lazy sunday

Post 11 of 90.

I was up late again last night and subsequently woke up around 2 pm today.

I couldn't bear to spend the day hanging around the house, so I showered up and came into town for a cappuccino. While I wonder about this compulsion to get out of the house, even though it's a 35 minute drive each way, I reflect that maybe life in the suburbs is not for me. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that suburbs are essentially large-scale nurseries devoted mainly to the raising of kids. It is a place where, by design, nothing much happens, and because of this I'm more than willing to drive long distances to be in an area where there are people and it at least seems like something is happening.

I also reflect that this car-bound cultural arrangement is bound to fail, and probably sooner than we would like. I guess we should enjoy it while it lasts.

And let's put "enjoy" into quotes, since I can't say I really like it or that it will ultimately be missed. I think it's more that I fear the inevitable disruption the collapse of this system will create in our lives before it sorts itself out, and I'm not looking forward to that. Whatever mechanical process we're caught in will apparently have its way with us. The crisis seems perpetually deferred, and yet inevitable. I don't how much longer business as usual can continue.

In the meantime, there is music to be made.

I also reflect that by and large, people are good. You just need to watch out for that esimated 1 in 25 who are born sociopaths--those who can literally do anything and feel no twinge of conscience, the "snakes in suits," the "pathocrats" who inhabit seek power and foment wars and mass murder, or maybe that guy down the street whose only small ambition is to nurture poisonous rumors among the people in his neighborhood.

Anyway, I'm still pondering the purchase of a ProTools LE system. I think I'm going to do it, but I'm not going to replace my PowerBook G4 right away. I'll keep it for now and see how well it handles the processing load of a ProTools system. It's probably more important right now that I get a backup hard drive, and I'm thinking I'm going to go for the the 500G model. I was going to go with 250G, but I had the realization that I would probably fill that up before I knew what was going on. My PowerBook has an 80G hard drive, and I once would've scoffed at the notion that could fill that up, and yet I've done it.

If I find I need more computing power, I'm thinking about going for the Mac Mini. I noticed they have Firewire interfaces, which would be a necessity, and if I'm going to devote a machine just to recording, I'll bypass all the costly frills. It also seems relatively more portable than a full-blown desktop machine, so I could concievably pack it up without too much fuss if I was going to record a jam somewhere. Not ideal, but better than getting a costly new MacBook laptop. I'll ask the Mac guy in the IT department at work what he thinks about it.

I've also been reading Everett's The Beatles As Musicians:Revolver through the Anthology, but I think the Pollack analyses of the songs are better. Pollack is much more lucid in how he lays out his ideas about how the Beatles' music worked. Everett talks way more about the cultural context and historical details of demos and overdubs, and I want to know more specifics about chord progressions, modulations, and details of melodic construction to the finished songs than he provides.