My god, it’s made of bullshit!

(Heh).

I guess I’m naive, because I’ve been having the same revelation over and over again for over 20 years now. More like 30, actually– I discovered this when I was still a kid.

One of the constant refrains in my life has been getting into some career or area, thinking that there is some integrity or objective reality therein, and then discovering, again and again, that it’s all just made of bullshit. This is especially true of anything that involves money, or making it. Within a short time, I discover that success has nothing to do with actual integrity or competence, it’s all lying, politics, fronting, marketing, wheedling, cheating, and bullshit, all the way through.

I can’t name all the things I’ve tried to do for money, which have been completely corrupted with bullshit; there have been too many. For most of the time I was in the tech business, I was in marketing, so I not only accepted the bullshit but actively embraced it and was paid to perpetuate it. I busted myself back down to private and became a tech grunt again, but it quickly became apparent that my job was little more than show and fronting– bullshit. Some years later, I figured out the bullshit nature of politics when I got involved in it. Just a few months ago, at the very end of last year, I figured out how the music business is made of bullshit (that should have been obvious, in retrospect, it is show business after all– all fakery and the like).

Just today, I just discovered that the tutoring company for which I’ve been doing some part-time work, is funded with No Child Left Behind money, and is basically part of Bush’s attempt to bust up the teacher’s unions and privatize education. And what does one get for one’s privatized contractor dollars? Uncredited, amateur tutors (um, like me), getting paid about half what a real teacher would get paid, and a cut-to-the-bone McSchool, with paltry materials, no curriculum whatsoever, and a startup-like environment of people who appear to have NFI what they’re doing.

Oh and it’s a non-profit too. Kind of. It’s part of a for-profit corporation, but it’s a non-profit. Uh, this smells so bad, I don’t wanna know.

I cannot wait for this entire economic system to come crashing down. It’s so decayed and fetid, the rot infests it so deeply, that the sooner it disappears, the better.

Musical stylistic isomorphism

Back in the 80’s, a friend noticed the isomorphism between punk rock and rap. Stripped-down, edgy, violently angry, atonal, lots of yelling. Music for angry young men.

I was very late in discovering both the highly-technical grindcore/death metal styles, and highly-technical IDM like Venetian Snares. I’m noticing now how similar they are/were. Very complex, almost (or in the case of IDM, definitely) impossible rhythms, lots of atonality, and harsh, violent anger. Music that really challenges– almost flips off– the audience. Brashly, unapologetically, and defiantly intellectual, with a “statistical density” (Zappa, the first IDM’er!?) that says, “Just you try and figure this shit out!”. And they both came into popularity at the same time, the mid-to-late 2000’s.

What I found interesting about the rap/punk isomorphism in the 80’s is that one evolved out of the dance/disco scene, the other out of the rock scene, and fairly independently, since the two scenes were fairly antagonistic (and, at the time, racially-divided too). A similar kind of parallel evolution seems to have happened with grindcore and IDM: one emergedout of the dance/disco scene, the other out of the rock/metal scene, and not too much overlap between those two scenes.

Of course, the trends have moved on, and I see parallel evolutions happening in the realm of ambient-noise and metal-noise: noisy non-rhythmic clouds of sound, converging on white noise, but one coming from a group making the noise via computers, and the other from a group making them via guitars.

I’ll never work on Macs again

If I can avoid it, I’ll never work on Macs again.

Sure, they kind of SMELL like unix, but they’re not. Perfect example: HFS+.

I took a short contract backing up data for a studio. They’re all based on OSX. Great, I thought, I’ll just use UNIX tools and this’ll be easy.

No.

First off, the machine that runs ProTools– the center of the studio– is an old G4 0SX 10.4 machine. Which means that Rsync and ditto DO NOT WORK on HFS+ files. They botch the resource forks. Auughh!! So all my backing up was useless. Luckily they had a MacBook sitting around with OSX 10.5 on it, so I moved the drives over and used that to do the backups and restoration.

Days pass. 150,000 files get backed up, and then 60 projects get manually organized and consolidated by me. Days of work. But to do that work, I had to hook the firewire backup drive up to the old 10.4 machine. You’re seeing where this is going, right?

I am ready to wrap up this fucking project. I put the drive onto the 10.5 machine so I can archive the cleaned-up, de-duplicated versions of the files onto a portable drive. And… THE FUCKING HFS+ FILE SYSTEM IS CORRUPTED. Auugh again!

This is the kind of shit that I’d never expect to happen on linux. ext3 is ext3. It doesn’t matter what machine you swap a disk over to. Also, people run the latest kernel on most of their machines– nobody charges them hundreds or thousands (in the case of ProTools) of dollars to upgrade their software, so most machines have fairly recent versions of everything.

I am Jack’s seething hatred.