The Last Candle

Now that the surprise is over with, here’s the dish.

With the work days lasting until 8 or 9 PM, I don’t feel like spending much time in the evening moping around the apartment. Downtown Ann Arbor, a harbor of comfortable places in which to lounge while imbibing in tea or microbrewed beer, is only a twenty-minute walk from my abode and has become a usual destination in the workday’s after-hours.

I found that the trips downtown were little less than a jaunt, a sit and a drink somewhere accompanied by a book, and then a jaunt back. Relaxing, yes, but after a few iterations I began to get the productivity itch. It wasn’t enough that I was out of the apartment — being out of the apartment and punching through a hobby sounded like a even more enjoyable endeavor.

So I brought out the legal pad and crunched math problems at the bar or in the corner of Sweetwaters. That worked, sort of. Legal pads are…limited. I mean, you can only use a sheet of paper once, right? Welcome to 1500 years ago, right? Though it may be legal, this papyrus justice does not conduce creative output to my pleasure.

So I bought a laptop.

I didn’t go with a Windows-based computer because, frankly, I had no interest in doing so. Vista is not on my radar after using it for a week or so (read: I didn’t like it) and buying yet another Windows XP box seemed like an entirely banal choice for what otherwise was a exciting opportunity. Enter the Mac.

The MacBook Pro has been in my possession almost two weeks. Now that the honeymoon is wearing off, I’m glad to retain the feeling that this machine, from operating system (Leopard!) down to the polish and power of the hardware itself, is a terrific little computer.

Leopard is well-featured (Dashboard, Expose and Spaces are very usuable and less gimmicky than the concepts lend to themselves), functional and offers more power and flexibility than I guessed. (I knew that since Leopard was based on Darwin BSD that it would arrive with the requisite terminal emulator, shells and hacky potential, but it also came preinstalled with little joys like Ruby. Sweet.) The notebook is light, less than an inch thick, comes with a backlit Apple logo on the cover and a sleep mode indicator that fades in and out slowly instead of blinking. Y’know, the important stuff.

A problem is finding new applications for it. Fanboys are always lauding Mac’s movie-making and graphics-editing proficiencies, and I want a piece of that. But to cut a slice of that pie requires me to purchase new sets of applications to get the same functionality I already get on my PC, or to install Boot Camp onto the Mac and run Windows in the background. I’m not sure which option of the two is less appealing at this point, but I haven’t come to a decision yet.

The MacBook is a lovely thing, in any case. The coffee at Sweetwaters has never tasted better.

The highlight of my day? Buying bacon and cheese and bread. Isn’t that lovely? I assure you — it was excellent bacon, nutty cheese, and a very lightly sour bread product. All delicious. All the nightcap on an otherwise long day at work.

Today’s toll workin’ for the machine was eleven hours. That’s not too bad, as far as funding the bacon-cheese-bread fund goes, but the grind doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for eating the bacon. Literally, that is. This is no place for innuendo.

Super Mario Galaxy was released on the Wii yesterday, and the Wii’s library finally has another good game. That makes about five. Wii Sports is long-lasting enjoyment anyway; the Swede visits a couple times a week, and the occasions always herald in another hour or two of Wii Sports’ Tennis. Strangely enough, the continued doubles matches have given way to a racy array of lingo for various tactics and dialogues in the game.

Baiting the beaver: when the player consistently hits the ball towards one side of the court, coercing the opposing player to pull further and further to that side.

Stuffing the beaver: following the baiting of the beaver, the player hits the ball to the opposite side of the court. If the opponent was baited successfully, he won’t have a chance at reaching the other side of the court to relay the volley. Stuffed. Swish.

Foreplay: when the two opposing players closest to the net hit the ball back and forth several consecutive times.

There’s your innuendo.

Part of me likes Jonathan Coulton’s music; the other part cringes a little bit at the pop hipness. He’s good, though. If you haven’t heard the song written by Coulton from the end of Portal, check it out, somewhere. (I haven’t played the game, but one of my podcasts played the tune at the end of the episode. I’m sure the plot of the game was spoiled in that, but it’s a splendid little song.)

Oh, how I love the Satch. New album in April, babies.

The new Progressive Nation tour for ‘08 already has Dream Theater, Opeth and 3 on-board. That’s already one hell of an awesome line-up. Now we just need the news that Steven Wilson and the rest of Porcupine Tree will be on the same bus. In the meantime, my Sonata Arctica show on the West Coast in February will have to do.

End of Wednesday. I’m going to go fiddle around with GarageBand now.

A hearty congratulations to Rod Anderson — my Dad — for his election to a seat on the Chelsea City Council.

I usually don’t like to talk about family or personal business around the site, and I particularly don’t like to talk about politics (which is a more recent change), but this election is both good and community-wide news. And over the months, as I’ve watched my Dad put together his campaign — my rare contribution was the photographs on the Chelsea Citizens for Accountability site — I’ve found local politics is actually pretty interesting, being steeped in, y’know, thoughtful debate and a conversation on issues, instead of the national electorate miasma that’s rife with a media-bolstered persistent cacophony of mudslinging, misconception, grinding gears and sleight of hand…

Sorry. That’s why I don’t like to talk about politics.

But Chelsea’s a nice little city, and I think Mr. Anderson’s going do a right fine job. I might even learn a thing or two about the city during future Friday night dinners at the folks’ house.

In episode 586 of the Buzz Out Loud podcast, a show that features fairly ordinary but well-produced tech news and commentary, the hosts made two adjacent statements regarding the creation of music albums that pulled my attention away from my work and into their conversation.

At 9:04 into the podcast episode, host Tom makes a statement that the second album from an artist is the one where the chops of the band are really revealed. The first album may have involved years of inspiration, throw-aways, polishing and preparation in a long time frame; the second album, usually bound by contract and written, recorded and produced within a year or two, is about making the music on-demand, completely lacking the soft pillow of several years for pulling together an album.

I completely agree with that theory, although there’s no study to back it up, of course. On the face, the theory makes a lot of sense: any artist is inspired and can build a composition in his head over a long span of time, cutting away the rough bits and smoothing out the promising threads. When the time comes to record, the pieces have been fit together over, say, five or ten years. However, to the listener (or producer, or label) only the album’s release, a largely singular event, is all that matters.

But what happens when the artist who built up a song catalogue over ten years is required to do the same process in two years? They’ll hit the tarmac, wheels a-squealin’, for that second album, sure, but can they accelerate to the same velocity of inspiration and composition of the initial release within a much shorter strip of road?

Since music composition is incredibly difficult and meticulous (and also lovely), my hypothesis regarding the quality of an artist’s sophomore album is that most of the time the artist won’t be able to shepherd and mold the muse under pressure, producing half-baked junk as a result. See: The Darkness, who entered the world’s rock and roll consciousness (five times platinum in England!) with the excellent Permission to Land, but then followed the initial effort with the completely mediocre and uninspired One Way Ticket to Hell…And Back.

Okay, so my set of evidence stands at one. I’m just talkin’ hypothesis here, folks. (Also on the topic of The Darkness: six months after the second album was released, in August 2006, the leader singer quit the band and went into rehab for cocaine addiction; the other members of the band added a replacement, but have yet to advertise the band’s new name or album details more than a year after the initial separation. Boy, that sophomore release can be rough, can’t it?

Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble’s second album, Couldn’t Stand the Weather, is excellent. Just sayin’.

Back to the ole’ Buzz Out Loud ‘cast. Shortly after Tom’s album production statement, other host Molly chimes in with her theory, the one that shocked me a lil’ bit.

Molly related that when checking out new albums, she listens to just the first track and the sixth track to get a general idea of the album’s quality. Track one ought to be good because it’s the album opener, but Molly — and I — testify that track six, roughly the middle of the album, is where more gold is usually found.

While I wasn’t too surprised that other folks came up with second-album idea, that idea being grounded on some kind of plausible reasoning, hearing someone else completely unaffliated to myself talk about the same sixth-song selection that I’ve been using for years was very surprising. And it’s true that I’ve used checked out the sixth song ahead of the other tracks for years, although it’s by no means the ultimate criteria that decides purchases. But I still beeelieeeve.

The Sixth Song Theory is just confirmation bias, but hey, it beats just jammin’ through one track after another when on limited time. Besides, none of the albums I buy ever have bad tracks.

Besides One Way Ticket, of course.

And the Shannon Curfman album I purchased a couple weeks ago.

And…well. Maybe I should be listening to the seventh song instead of the sixth.