Monday, June 23, 2003 5:16 PM | Matthew Jeanes Mac OS X is completely incompatible with Mac OS 9, is that right? At least, if you want to run a program you bought for OS 9 you have to get an upgraded version or a patch to run it in OS X. It seems to me like Mac users are willing to overlook things like launching a whole new OS when it suits them, but don't have a problem making blanket statements about the stupidity of the PC market. I don't care for any of it personally, but PCs are cheaper and do essentially the same thing as far as I am concerned, so I'm not 'making the switch' anytime soon. The cult of Mac has gotten so out of hand. There's nothing like an OS that is supposed to be built on the lowest common denominator inspiring heated techno-elitism! Leave it to the fanboys to rage about anything, I guess. All I know is that when I buy a piece of software, it better work with my hardware, and it better keep working without requiring me to purchase an upgrade... ever. It should always AT LEAST work the same amount that it did when it was released. Software licensing is such a scam anyway... what else do you buy that comes with a note that says "look mister, you don't OWN this, and you didn't PURCHASE it from us, it is just LICENSED to you, and we can revoke that license at any time. Who let this happen? Tuesday, June 17, 2003 10:19 AM | Matthew Jeanes There was an article in the new Wired today that talked about a woman who bought what may be an original Jackson Pollock painting for $5 at a garage sale. There's apparently some fevered debate going on in the art world about whether or not it is indeed a Pollock original or just a hack imitation. If it's authentic, the woman may be looking to unload the painting for upwards of 11 million dollars on the open market, but if not, most everyone seems content to let her keep it as a painting worth only the $5 she originally paid for it. The irony of this situation is terrific. A 20th Century American master of modern art creates works so indistinguishable from imitators and 9th grade abstract expressionism projects that the inteligensia who are the self-appointed appraisers of artistic value are having to resort to DNA testing to prove if they should value a painting at 11 million, or five dollars! It seems to me like this is a good lithmus test for valuing art: if you can't tell if it's worth $5 or $11 million dollars, you should probably stick with $5.00. I understand Pollock's impact on modern art and his contribution, but the fact that people are more interested in his DNA than his paint points to the way people make value judgements about art. Monday, June 16, 2003 2:37 PM | Matthew Jeanes We've got a show in Orlando this Thursday. It'll be the first Larvae show since the Echo Lounge show back in March that about 15 people witnessed. Florida is hot and depressing, but at least they seem to be embracing some interesting music. Who would have thought that Funkstorung would be a more viable show in Orlando than Atlanta? But that certainly IS the case. Maybe Orlando isn't caught in the throes of retro fashion and the near worship of all things 1983. Maybe it is, and maybe there are just some people in Orlando who are tired of it and are rebelling towards things like Funkstorung and Machine Drum. In any event, Pitchforkmedia.com ran a review today of the new Metallica album; if that doesn't tell you where their priorities lie, nothing will. Everywhere you go, it's all the same. Thursday, June 12, 2003 1:08 PM | Matthew Jeanes Someone sent a demo to sub:marine the other day that had a curious thing written on the accompaning letter: "No samples were used in the creation of this music." I've come to expect that sort of thing from rock bands who want to prove they are above 'augmenting' their tracks with sampled drums and things, but this was an all electronic, sort of idm-y collection of tracks from a Canadian guy who is obviously pulling from influences like Boards of Canada, Plaid, etc. I don't really understand the anti-sample movement any more than I understand the anti-midi movement. There is nothing intrinsically less creative about using samples- in fact, I'd argue that it's sometimes harder to make interesting sample-based music than it is to make music with a similar tone with just synths because when working with samples, you have to manipulate the sounds to become your own. My work is almost entirely sample-based, and I'm not about to change that. I think the idea of drawing the little bits and scrapes of other peoples' records that you like or think might be interesting and merging them into something completely new is just as valid of a method of composition as any other. There are going to be bad, bad examples of that compositional technique (MC Hammer ripping off superfreak for instance) but there are also brilliant works of collage (Beastie Boys-Pauls' Boutique) and cases where people take samples and use them only as raw sound to make new sounds altogether. So, what's up with the 'we don't use any samples' bravado? And don't get me started on the 'we don't use MIDI' people! Wednesday, June 11, 2003 12:49 PM | Matthew Jeanes Okay, it's not like I watch Entertainment Tonight on a regular basis, but I happened to be flipping past it when I caught a shot of Mary Hart interviewing Harrison Ford. Now, the media likes to paint Ford as a 'recluse' who is very shut off from the public life that his celebrity entails. It's probably closer to the truth to characterize him as a sane human being who doesn't like to have people taking a picture of him every time he takes a dump any more than the next person, and as someone who doesn't feel like his personal life is anyone else's business. I wouldn't know for sure, because I've never met him. However, in this interview, Mary Hart was trying to play the role of the sympathizer by phrasing questions like 'so, how is your relationship with Calista Flockhart going?' as 'It must be hard for you to have the media always asking about your private life.' The way she turned this around, as if she were NOT a member of the media and NOT part of a show that thrives on stalking celebrities to get the dirt on their private lives was amazing! She was nodding, with her head titled to the side in that classic gesture of 'understanding' when she further probed about how things were going with Ford's girlfriend, all the while trying to agree that 'Yes, the media can be so intrusive and annoying.' HELLO FUCKING MARY HART! YOU ARE THE PROBLEM!!!! This, of course, comes from Mary Hart, who is so talentless and vain that she had her legs insured for a million or so dollars because the opening shot of her on Entertainment Tonight featured what I suppose she thought was her best attribute- her legs. Well, her best feature certainly isn't her journalistic integrity, her ability to ask probing, intelligent questions, or her knowledge of anything other than celebrity gossip--so insuring her head would have been a waste of time. I hope that other people see this kind of hypocricy in the media and call it out. I was embarrassed for Harrison Ford that he didn't call her out on it, and sad that for a man with such an interesting life that the most pressing thing on Mary Hart's audience's mind was how he and his girlfriend were getting along. It would have been nice to ask him about the upcoming Indiana Jones sequel, but I'll have to leave that for the snobby guy on the Actor's Studio. This problem was further exacerbated by some special they had on VH1 or E! or one of those networks that focuses almost solely on celebrity gossip about the problems of the papparazzi. I wish I were famous for no other reason than I would be able to give those morons a piece of my mind on a daily basis. I'd love to be vilified as the person who hunted down and beat the crap out of all of those cretins who stalk people to capture their private moments on film for millions upon millions of gossip-hungry housewives and do-nothings to look at. People are disgusting. 11:42 AM | Matthew Jeanes Is anyone else upset about the constant misuse of the term 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'? It seems like the Media have helped to confuse the issue by constantly bouncing back and forth between talking about WMD and Biological/Chemical weapons. In truth, Biological/Chemical weapons don't really Destroy anything! And in practice, they don't have a Mass effect on anything other than the public consciousness and collective fear of attack. It should probably be understood that biological and chemical weapons (the kind carried by missles--the ones we are looking for in Iraq) have a limited range. It takes a massive concentration of these agents to have much of a serious affect, and they are easily defended by simply avoiding the areas where the weapons have been discharged. In time, nature takes care of the problem naturally, and cleans up the area, disipating the agents to a point where they are no longer harmful in a relatively short time. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of VX Gas attack... it would be nasty. But even if the Iraqi army has bunkers full of nerve gas missles, those missles are not long-range, inter-continental missles that could be launched from Iraq to hit the USA, and they aren't Weapons of Mass Destruction as defined by the DoD. So, what are we going to do? It certainly looks like, at this point, that Bush's use of the WMD scare tactic to drum up support for the war was just that- a propaganda tool to make people feel like we needed to strike Iraq now. I'm not passing judgement on the situation yet because who knows what we will find over there, but I'm skeptical as to the validity of the WMD claim, and I wish more people could understand the failure in the media to make that term understood. Monday, June 09, 2003 12:48 PM | Matthew Jeanes New song complete over the weekend called 'Philistine'. This is a good example of the serendipity of language catching up with you. As a writer, I've often felt like I wasn't entirely responsible for the things that I wrote--that there were somehow implicit connections between the words that I wasn't making consciously, but were so strongly there when I read back through my writing that I couldn't help but be thankful that I had unlocked them. Everyone groans in their high school english classes when the teacher tries to tell them that the author meant X, Y, and Z by the words she chose to describe an event. There are going to be people who read too much into things, for sure, but there are also connections between words and ideas that make sense that may not have been on the forefront of an author's mind, but nevertheless work to enhance the meaning of the finished product. I had been thinking a lot about issues related to Christianity as I was working on this song, and as is usually the case, I had no idea for a name until I was forced to save the program and sequence. The first thing that came to mind was 'philisitine' which I knew was vaguely Biblical, but whose meaning wasn't coming to mind other than it was a somewhat derrogatory thing, I thought. I looked it up and it refers to a person who is ignorant of the arts and culture, brutish, and that was exactly what was on my mind this week (you can see it yourself in the blogs.) I had been thinking a lot about people who are exceedingly middle-of-the-road, and that's exactly what this word means! Chalk one up for the human brain! Friday, June 06, 2003 4:00 PM | Matthew Jeanes We are still trying to write and record songs for the Ad Noiseam album due out in September. So far, there are a handful of tracks done, but I have no idea if they will all mesh together into one cohesive release, or if some tracks will fit together better than others once they are all done. We'll be playing mostly new material at our show in Orlando to give it all a test run. At the last show we played at the Echo Lounge, we played almost all new songs and people seemed to be pretty receptive. New songs thus far include: Dither (an old, old song resurrected with new sounds) Refuse (the newest one that is done-bursts of noise that mellow over time) The Voice Collapse (my favorite so far, nice and crunchy 100 bpmish track not unlike a more melodic REDLINE) Anthrobasis (featuring Magicicada) Wreck (strange, slow monster of crunchy beats) Still Raw (still in progress, but this is the first dnb style track so far) Man, is that it? Gotta ramp up production. The Dalek remix took a lot of time, and we are going to be working on a remix for Displacer, but we've gotta nail down about 6 more songs first. Ouch. Thursday, June 05, 2003 11:22 AM | Matthew Jeanes Caught this quote in my brother-in-law's blog today and felt it needed some rebuttle: "This is why big government is a much more sinister force than big business." Um, what? The first question I would ask is 'What is the difference between big business and big government?' Part of the way big business protects its own financial interests is by mingling with and influencing government. With billions of dollars on the line, it is unreasonable to assume that the leaders of the world's largest corporations would not use any and all means at their disposal, including the quasi-legal bribery we call campaign financing, to achieve their own goals. This is the probelm with the connection of business and government, because a business has a stated, bottom-line goal that is usually to make money, nothing more. Look at the mission statements of companies like Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Nike-- they invariably include language about 'increasing value for shareholders' which means that these companies are not in business to make soda, cars, or shoes. Making those products is merely a means to an end, a way to increase value for shareholders. Now, in many ways, big businesses are actually more honest about their intentions than government officials who claim to act in the public interest, but are obviously motivated by financial and professional gain. But that doesn't make them better. The second question I would ask is, 'Isn't it obvious that the corruption of government began with the influence of business, and not the other way around?' It seems like if you take the theoretical model of our government and just look at the documents that framed the system that we have in place, the model itself is rooted in thoughtful reflection on how a democratic society ought to run. In the days before multi-national corporations with more money and influence than even the federal government, the system was perhaps less prone to abuse by business interests. That's not to say we enjoyed 150 years of perfect democracy before the 1950s- there has always been corruption and forces that work to undermine the good intentions of the founding fathers. However, with the industrial revoltion bringing about the mega-corporations and the media-age consolidating the outlets for information and the means by which that information is delivered, government frankly doesn't stand a chance. For those who claim that our elections are merely a popularity contest, they are right insofar as our elections are media spectacles not unlike reality tv. Politicians have to use the methods of manipulating public opinion that the media has made commonplace, and have to appear to the public more like media stars than learned leaders. Private interests to make money have corrupted our very system of government from the way our leaders are elected to the way they look at every issue up for vote. Big government isn't the problem. Big government in big business' pocket, is. Monday, June 02, 2003 10:40 PM | Matthew Jeanes Thank you, FCC. I was beginning to worry about the Fox's, AOLTimeWarners, and Clear Channels of the world who were being unfairly held back from making maximum profits for their shareholders by those obsessively restrictive Media Ownership guidelines. There are, in fact, a few radio stations in Atlanta that are not yet controlled by Clear Channel. There are even a few concerts in town that are not promoted by Clear Channel, and it would have been unfair to keep them from deciding what all of Atlanta gets to hear and see. After all, this is a FREE MARKET--an economic enviroment governed by one and only principle: profit. Government has meddled in the affairs of business for too long with regulations, restrictions, rules, and penalties. It's time we freed the corporations of the world up for an all out assault on the final vestages of choice and freedom of expression we have left here. The sad fact is, that we let it happen. I see these people every day--the people who willingly cling to the latest reality tv show's 'characters' and who line up cheerfully to buy Kelly Clarkston CDs and Sprite Remix soda bottles. I see the kids every day downtown with the $120 NBA jerseys, and the kids in the mall with the $29 knock-offs. I was at the mall last week to see a movie and every single person sitting in the food court besides me had a Chick-fil-A bag on their table. I was just wondering how well a boring, homogenized fast-food chain like Chik-fil-A would do in a mall and then I looked and noticed that not one table lacked a bag or cup from Chick-fil-A despite about ten other (mostly better) choices for food. People who sound spiteful when they call people sheep are just calling the kettle black, and only sound miffed about it because they've already realized the futility. CD prices at a 'normal' store are upwards of $18, almost everyone in my office has at least one SUV in the immediate family, and Bruce Almighty has grossed enough money to feed an entire town for a month. I point these things out because when the FCC decides to grant a victory to big business, to take away the public airwaves and let the highest bidders partition them for profit, I think there are very few who will notice. It will just mean that Pepsi and Brittany are easier to find than ever. And that's a good thing, right?

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