Breakfast with Jon. Then he went back to his studio to work with Round Mountain, who are finishing up their next album and I went home to work on a new slideshow for my solo performances. It will be ready for the concerts in Europe in October, but I hope to premier it in San Francisco next month.
I want add two new elements. Words and video. The words will be in many different languages, maybe reminiscent of the words on Opium which were spoken in Farsi, Russian, Korean and French. Here are a couple of glimpses:
The video at the top was not formatted correctly and ended up being a little horizontally stretched, but you’ll get the idea. There will be more glimpses to come in the next few weeks. For extra fun you can start both videos…
Pasatiempo, the arts and culture insert published by the New Mexican newspaper every Friday, had a full-page and nice (I am told – I haven’t read it) article on our Lensic concert next week. They used Roshi Joan Halifax’s photo from Kham for the piece, which I think is great.
Did short interviews with local public radio station KSFR at 11:30 and 17:45.
Sadly the other local station (((KBAC cough, cough))) cancelled an interview that was set up for this past Tuesday at the last minute, demanding that we buy advertising time for the benefit in exchange for the interview. For a BENEFIT!! That’s a serious lack of community-sense, I say!
Rode the Mariachi Bullitt to an early breakfast with Jon. Discussed video games. I bought a Playstation ten years ago and played a few games, but it’s been gathering dust for years. Video games just don’t seem interesting to me. When talking about this subject to another friend over lunch last week, he said that maybe the technology just needs to be taken further. I said that there are two separate issues I have with video games.
The first issue is that one basically plays the same scene over and over. One gets better at that particular scene, of course, but so what, it’s too narrow of an experience. Let’s say there is a bike-messenger video game versus a bike-messenger racing through a real town. In the video game version the truck on 46th street will ignore the stop sign every time, so watch out for him… in real life you’ll never know what the truck-driver will do so you’d better be prepared. The video game rehearses one particular set of events, while life is full of surprises…
So, my friend said, well, they just need to create more variations, so that you play a different scene every time. True, I answered, but there will still only be x-possible variations, unless we get to the point where the computer can actually re-write the scene every time – like generative music. And, this is my second issue, I still won’t smell the tar they are cooking to fix the potholes on Eight Avenue, or the perfume of the woman who just crossed the street, and I won’t feel the breeze on my face or the steam from rising up from grates on the street.
So, why would I play a bike game, rather than riding my bike?
Video games seem to solve that problem by creating game-play that enables the player to do stuff that would otherwise be punished by society, e.g. stealing cars, killing loads of people etc… Hm, that also does not sound the least bit interesting to me. Want to study fighting, go to a karate club?
When I discussed this with Jon, I suddenly thought of a game I would want to play. I am currently reading about the adventures of the eunuch Yashim Togalu in Istanbul in 1836. It would be lovely to have be able to walk through a 3D rendering of Istanbul circa 1836… But, who else would want to see that!???? And it would be less of a game and more of a moving map. Hm, like Google Earth with more detail and a time button…
Then I started thinking about whether there is an advantage to rehearsing a specific scene, the undulations of a race course for example. I would love to know how big an advantage a race-car driver who did 10, 50, 100 laps around a course in a video game would have against a second driver who hasn’t played the video game, if they are both racing around the same course in real cars. What would happen if the second driver had a head start of 10 test-laps on the real course, while the first driver did 20, 50 100 virtual laps before racing? Again, real race craft is more than knowing the race course. It’s being able to judge how wide one’s car is, knowing how to deal with a new oil spot in the third turn, how to escape an out-of-control car coming too close etc.
Good rehearsal with the band. Recorded all of the new arrangement-bits. Then packing for the tour.
I didn’t like the Ultrasone headphones when I first listened to them on Tuesday afternoon. Since I had read that they need to be burned in for a while in order to develop nice bass – it’s very flabby and overwhelming at the beginning – I left them running for several hours and had iTunes pump a random selection of music through them. Yesterday evening they started to sound quite nice.
People are a like old oak tables. Knives cut into the table accidentally, sharp object are dropped on it, liquids are spilled on it and it may become either more beautiful because of that… or useless. It’s in the way we carry our scars that makes us appear beautiful or ugly.
Rode my fixie to my breakfast-klatsch with Jon. It’s almost perfect, as it silently glides along… the handlebar should be about 2 inches higher. Will have to investigate options with David @ Mellow Velo.
Was driving my car the other day, maybe Monday, and a thought came into my mind. In the car it felt like beautiful, if ephemeral thought, or maybe more like a feeling… After I came home, I could not express it well. I wrote some of it down anyway:
Happy, sad or enlightened? There are millions of books on those three subjects. I doubt that they are very useful, really. The old oak table needs to be aged and patinated (((I had to look that verb up!!))) in order to shine… A lot of people assume that happiness or enlightenment should be a permanent all-encompassing state. In fact, doesn’t the brain always look for some kind of permanence, something that does not change… or it defers permanence to the future – and if it can’t find anything permanent in this lifetime, it may find it in its next lifetime or in the afterlife – depending on your religious preference.
We have discovered that there is no such thing as one measure of intelligence. There are many levels and lines of intelligence. Math intelligence, emotional intelligence… a person might score off-the-chart on a Western intelligence test and might be unfit to tie their shoes, not to mention being able to hold a conversation. Having accepted that there are many, many different lines of intelligence, we should accept that happiness and enlightenment are similar, not a permanent state, but an opening that has many levels and can always be deepened. I heard Stephen Batchelor say Enlightened about WHAT exactly? Or, there are so many different lines and levels of enlightenment – which of them are you talking about?
Or take happiness – isn’t happiness just a way to accept what is here anyway. Otherwise happy would change a million times a day. They kept you on hold too long when you called the phone company, somebody cut you off in traffic, your cellphone fell between your car’s pedals etc. etc…
And that reminded me of this. Long-time meditators, monks even, have been known to fall apart at the sight of a woman, or alcohol or drugs. They had advanced very far along one particular line, but had not advanced at all along others?
Happiness and sadness seem only skin-deep with most of us. When we win, when things go our way, we are happy. A few drops of rain and some bad news and we are sad. Above the clouds the sky is always the same. White clouds, dark clouds, a storm or a clear sky… above it the sky is always blue.
Anyway, it is interesting that all of those words are merely a bad interpretation of a little feeling or thought that probably lasted a few seconds.
This afternoon: soundcheck for a private performance that Jon and I are doing this evening. We decided on upright bass and my Flamenca negra. It’s a wonderful rumble, when he bows the beast!
I listened to a sound collage I made a couple of years ago, from sounds I recorded in April of 2007 in Germany and Austria. It sounds amazing and I thought about making it available in the form of a .aif file (CD quality: 16/44.1). You can travel without moving!
It was only 28ºF this morning and I discussed transportation with myself. Arguments for and against using my bicycle were exchanged, but in the end I bundled up and took off on the Mariachi Bullitt to meet Jon for breakfast. We discussed that there seems to be more interest in audiophile sound these days. Good!
The second one is particularly interesting as it compares SACD to great vinyl. Then I found this piece, which compares SACS and DVD-Audio and prefers DVD-A. I also noticed that Logic 8 allows the burning of DVD-A. DVD-A does sound very promising. When I was still with Epic Records I spoke to an executive there, it must have been around 1999, who had one of only seven DVD-A players in the country, and he raved about the sound quality! I myself have never heard it. (((however I have heard 24/96 in my studio, because One Guitar and Up Close were recorded like that…)))
While we are staying in Manhattan in May (((five nights at the Blue Note))) Jon and I will try to locate an audiophile dealer there. We want to listen to DVD-A players and see what the fuss is about. I don’t think DVD-A will be a commercial option and we’ll have to wait until high quality 24/96 or 24/192 files can be losslessly compressed and downloaded.
I was glad I decided to ride my bike and ended up riding for about an hour today. I enjoy the easy communication with pedestrians. How can a pedestrian communicate with a car or SUV, especially when the windows are tinted and inpenetrable!! Like talking to a tank.
Yesterday Jon modified his bassline for Heart Still/Beating and sent the new parts to me via DropBox. For some reason that only DigiDesign understands, the .sd2 files could NOT be read by my ProTools computer. When he sent .aif files instead they were read and located perfectly. Our theory is that since .sd2 is a proprietary file-format DigiDesign can do some black magic when the file travels across a non-ProTools computer. A file typically journeys from his ProTools desktop computer to his non-ProTools laptop and from there to the DropBox on the Information Highway. Then it is downloaded by my non-ProTools laptop and carried on a pocket drive to the ProTools computer in the studio – which has never been connected to the internet. No big deal, just won’t use .sd2 (Sound Designer II) files anymore. I have only used .aif for years, but we still used .sd2 when we recorded The Santa Fe Sessions in 2001-2002
Worked on a third Lava track, this one called Gothic Rock – how DID we come up with those titles??? Nice dynamics. These new Lava mixes sound so much better to me than the old ones.
Received an advance copy of Roy Rogers’ new album Split Decision, which will be released next week, I believe. I played a Flamenco guitar solo on the track Your Sweet Embrace.
Matt Schoening permitted me to make my rough mix of Kites Over the Playa available to you next week. It features the guitar a little more than the album mix does and I quite like the way it sounds.
Tuesday evening I made dinner for Roshi Joan Halifax, who just returned from Dharmsala, India. She told me about new scientific findings regarding meditation. Amazing stuff. And, check out this photo Roshi took of Kazuaki Tanahashi. I love the band of color in an otherwise nearly black & white image.
