(Phaysis)

This question goes out to all you librarians and taxonomists in my readership.

I have a large music collection, and I make every effort to keep all of my file tags as clean, correct and complete as possible. This allows me to easily search my collection and drill down to the artist, album, and song I demand to hear at that moment. If you’ve ever seen my CD collection, you’re aware of my meticulous arranging and sorting by certain criteria. The same is with my electronic collection. Physically, I prefer to sort by artist, then by album release date. Electronically, I can sort by any taxonomy I so choose. Easy enough.

So, going back to my library research orientation in my first year in college, I learned that books are sorted by subject, then by the author’s name, last name first, and then by book title. If the first word of the title is an article like “a”, “an” or “the”, it is moved to the end of the title after a comma and the book is sorted appropriately. So if I were to search for H.G. Well’s “The Time Machine”, I would search in the fiction section under the author “Wells, H.G.”, then for “Time Machine, The” somewhere after “Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. This makes sense. If the author was a publishing group or authorship can’t be pinned to one author, then it would be sorted under the group name.

I do the same with my music collection. If the album is published under a band name, then it’s sorted alphabetically under the band name. Aerosmith would be sorted before Aphex Twin. But if the album is published under the artist’s name, then it’s sorted by the artist’s name, last name first. So Fiona Apple would be sorted between Aphex Twin and Apples In Stereo under Apple, Fiona. This makes sense.

When I first built my music collection, back when music software wasn’t so smart, I would manually put articles at the end of the album and song titles because the software could clump all of the “The”s together, etcetera. It’s a pain and a hassle to do it manually, and sometimes the “extra album info” features of the software would break because it didn’t recognize the album title, but I lived with it. Luckily, modern music software has gotten smart about the use of articles in the song and album titles and sorts appropriately in the music browser interface.

But the problem comes with the artist names, which I store in my particular, perfectly reasonable way according to my training and my experience with sorting physical media: last name, then first. However, the software doesn’t know that I’m listening to Fiona Apple; it searches the web for Apple, Fiona and finds no data to show. Just like the old days with the title articles, so it is with artist names.

So what do you guys do about this? Is saving the artist name as “Last, First” still viable, or is it a vestigial relic of an older technology? I like to sort by this method because it makes sense to me; I shudder to think about trying to scroll through a page of Michaels just to get to Michael Hedges. I don’t know, maybe doing the “Last, First” method is as obsolete in the electronic realm as typing double spaces after sentences; a complete necessity on technologies now rendered obsolete. Should I get modern and save artist names in the natural format? Most player software has a search box to allow me to jump straight to my desired songs, but I’d have to change my habits.

What’s your thought?

So how you guys doing? Good? You folks comfy enough? Grab a chair, pull up some floor. Me, I’m doing swell. Just dandy. Got a short story from last year I’m retouching, chapter by chapter. Also reviving some old songs for posting at my Glass Door site.

To do that, I revived my old desktop PC and am trying to remaster some of that music for posting, and lemme tell ya, it’s not so easy. I honestly can’t see how I got anything done with that old piece of shit. But I got it working, sorta, enough to tweak some music. I’ll have to wire the PC into my actual recording gear to record the audio, since the computer is too old and ill-maintained to record its own audio without dropping clicks and pops into the recorded waveform. [frowny-face]

Actually, the only thing I really need that PC for is the Yamaha S-YXG50 synth software which was written so long ago that it won’t work on modern systems. I have a few songs whose sound depends on that software, so as soon as I record those tracks, I can transfer all the files, mothball the PC and move on. (If none of that made sense to you, just lay down on the floor and close your eyes until the confused feeling passes.)

Let’s see…what else? Ah, yes, against all better judgment and wisdom, I signed a 6-month lease extension on my apartment. It’s an OK place, but my neighbors suck. I’ve reached a point where I don’t care how much noise I make, because obviously the McStompy’s upstairs and the pasty-white soul screamer next door don’t care, either. Last weekend, I cranked up the bass box on my sound system and turned on the music just to prove to them how thin the walls are. Maybe they got the message, I don’t know. But there I am, living there for another 6 months. Here’s hoping I don’t lose my job anytime soon, eh?

Speaking of job, one of the managers in my department, a decent guy who’d been there for most of his professional career, gave his two-week notice. I was chatting about it with another coworker, and apparently he’s leaving the company to pursue a new career. Which I was fine with until I found out what he’s looking at doing: going into researching Creation Science. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute.

Now, I can’t fault someone for having a passion. Hell, can’t fault someone for making a conscious decision to change their life, lifestyle, and career to explore their faith. But Creation Science? Why not study UFOs or something else instead? It’s just as factual. It just gets my goat, a perfectly sane, technical man deciding to look for data to support his religious claims. It’s like a drunk man using a lamp post more for support than illumination.

Even when I was a dyed-in-the-cloth Southern Baptist evangelical youth, I could still find a way to reconcile the creation mythos with evolutionary science. They fit perfectly. Did I think the earth was 6000 years old? No way. I knew the universe was eons old, broader than consciousness, and that it could still fit in God’s pocket. I carried with me the understanding that the physical processes that govern the universe are the tools that god used to create everything. It made complete sense that all life on Earth would start from the simplest forms and evolve up to the high forms we exhibit. That was the real design. Even our nation’s founding fathers, who were die-hard Deists, held this opinion. He wrote the rules, and we eventually happened, not the other way around.

I just cannot fathom the leap of logic necessary to believe that dinosaur bones were placed inside the ground by the Devil, with permission from God, in order to test our faith in the Creator.

It is with profound joy that I announce that after so many wasted years of missing the boat, my music site is up, live and functional, and that you can now hear some of my music. About damned time.

“Where is it?” you ask? Well, it’s where you would expect to find that great music from the band Glass Door:  glassdoor.net!

I still have a few loose ends to tie up, but there it is. So far, I have two full songs and one “found sound” posted. I’m even going so far as to make cover images for each song I post — in some respects, I’m more proud of the images than the songs, but I love all of it anyway. Call me Pygmalion.

What do you think, sirs?

Spread a little thin tonight. Finally did laundry, which I’ve been meaning to do for days but put off because 1) I hate doing laundry and 2) I’ve been feeling a little ill (just a little) all week (not sure if it’s the cedar, the weather, or just my time of the year for a cold). My problem with laundry night is that I have to change into older (read: tighter) clothing, and then devote several hours of my night to the boring, unsettling task of going to the laundromat. Chores suck. During that time, I get way too many inspirations and desires to do something else, desires that never manifest any other night. Pity, that.

While packing up my clothes and supplies, I had an inspiration, a melody, a phrase of song. Ran to my keyboard and pecked it out. Luckily, I remember a little of where I put my fingers, but the sound of the inspiration is gone. Disappeared like a vapor, like a cloud of breath on a cold day. You breathe it out, watch the cloud shift, and then it’s gone forever. Best you can hope for is to remember what it looked like.

Since I was feeling a little inspired musically, I took my drum machine with me to the laundromat. Had high intentions. The problem with hammering out a rhythm on this machine is one of mechanics: in order to record a drum track, I need to find an empty slot for the pattern and select from a dizzying range of drum kits before I can even lay down a loop that sounds something like my idea. With practice, this dance would become easier, but until then, it’s an obstacle of frustration. Most musicians develop habits and methods to move through these problems, but not me. Not yet.

It’s as though I need a studio engineer on retainer, ready whenever I am inspired to record something. In this regard, I’m jealous of the artist known as Prince, who is rumored to have his entire mansion wired for recording, and has a staff on-hand to press “record”. If only we could all have the help we need when we need it. Or our own laundry appliances.

After pecking on the drum machine, I got tired, fatigued really, and my will to thump beats dissappeared like a vapor. Eyes glazed over. Just too ill, I guess, to create my own stuff. I hate that feeling. So I pulled out “Cryptonomicon” and picked up my reading. I should’ve done that from the outset; would’ve gotten farther just focusing on one thing than timesharing between urges.

My battle in life is one of focus and attention, the fact that to actually get anywhere in my life, I need to cultivate the dogged determination to see a task through to its goal. To win by crossing the finish line in due time. A marathon is not run in chunks, with breaks for distraction; it is run by one foot in front of the other for 26.2KM, no matter how much acid builds up in your veins. It is run by determined rhythm. It is run by measured breathing. It is run until you cross the line.

I’ve been throwing myself into full-on adoration for Karin Dreijer Andersson and any project she’s involved in. She has a vocal, lyrical, and thematic style that drips with creativity and mastery of the art. And then I look at my own projects, and am suddenly jealous of her success. When I pull back to consider all of the other artists she works with, it becomes certainly clear to me that nothing of worth can grow in a vacuum. It takes a village to write a song.

It’s apparent now that I’ve been holing up in my little room, never venturing out to see other artists, never once looking up to find artist collectives and creativity support groups. I’ve been insular and away from it all for years. An island against the scene.

But there is no fire without fuel and air. When you consider the amount of labor involved in the creation of music, only the most gifted among us can operate in solitude and produce brilliance. The rest of us, when we try the same, are only capable of putting out mediocrity. We all need help. We all need the hands of others to help with the heavy lifting. We have to rely on the competencies of those in our tribe to turn a mess of ideas into gold.

I did a little searching tonight. Found a few local blogs that loosely follow the local electronic music scene. I’m also thinking more of looking at flyers and reading the Chronicle for listings of shows that I should probably see. It’s a start, I guess. Certainly more novel than turning on my equipment and doing nothing. If you know of any support group for creatives in Austin, I’d love to know about it. Do you have any advice, any direction, on where to begin in allying with like-minded people in this town of a million people? Give me a hint. Nudge me along.