bensommer's blog

Here's another post from the vault. As I look forward to selling the house we've lived in for 9 years and moving to another phase of life with the family, I'm getting nostalgic for when we moved here. This is the shot of the front. Yes that's a turret with rounded-glass windows. Its just as charming inside. Its a dream house, just in a run-down neighborhood and town that we've outgrown.

July 7, 2003

I sat my fattening ass down to get caught up here, and it turns out that today is the one year anniversary of this journal. I have averaged about two entries per month - which is good enough. I have also grown up some, and can discern this if I read through the entire year at once. I also realize that, however few others around the world read this (though I suspect there are at least a dozen and a half or so out there) this will be a great legacy to leave for my SON/DAUGHTER - who is due around February 15. My wife loves too-cute, snob names like 'Eli' and 'Ethan' and 'Elijah', or 'Noah', or 'Abigail', or 'Eva'. I'll vomit out my left lung before I allow any of those. I don't mind 'Eli' short for 'Elliot', though Rhonda can't seem to get it into her head that familiar names are usually abbreviations of more humdrum - and, yes - conservative names. Maybe we'll do like my brother, and decide we like the dog's name so much (Jack) that we'll hand it down to the boy and just start calling the dog 'Butch' - he was too dumb to know any different anyway. I think they would've named the boy Jack-short-for-John, except that they would've still called him Jack, and two Jacks in the house would be potentially traumatizing for the little guy (Butch, that is). So - how does 'Kitty' sound?

The house we purchased on May 15 is big and definitely propels us a few rungs higher up the middle class ladder. Its an 1865 early Victorian-style home with a round turret corner, thin-cut parquet flooring, two fireplaces lined with glazed tile and an iron 'cherub' lamp perched on the stair railing. Its in Rockland, MA - a straight-up working class town, with a history in shoe manufacturing, now with a Home Depot, Blue Cross offices, a couple housing projects, and the kickass-est liquor megastore in Southeast Massachusetts - right down the street. People drive down from New Hampshire to shop there. They have every conceivable imported Belgian and German ale, cheap. Heaven.

Our street, Union, is the so-called historic street, with dozens of Federalist and Victorians, but mostly in a state of bastardization, primarily because the housing boom has not boomed hard enough to incentivize landlords to reconvert all their Painted Lady-cum-vinyl-sided boarding houses into Boston-commuter, This Old House-type, yuppie-wet-dream houses - much less to induce the yuppies to buy on noisy, motorcycle-ridden Union Street. Our place is a bright exception. It was bought up by the funeral home across the street in 1987 to tear down for a parking lot, though the local Housing Commission raised a stink, and a woman named Faith stepped in with a $1 offer to move it off the lot. She owned the multi-unit house directly across Union, which had a 1 acre-deep wood behind it. She cleared a lot in the wood, poured a concrete foundation, and moved the house whole-hog up the little hill, adding an updated (by 1987 standards) kitchen and finishing the attached carriage house as a one-bedrom in-law apartment. The only casualty of the move was the copper spire on top of the turret. It sits in the basement, and when I'm done with the arduous job of restoring and painting the exterior, I'll ceremoniously recap it. Among the warm-ups for the painting marathon was roto-tilling the "backyard" into shape, sawing off the weeds of Maple saplings, and chipping up all the wood slag.

So how much? Everyone always wants to know. I'm not saying, because the mental obsession middle class people have with real estate and home owning, and their irresistable urge to ask 'how much?', and to offer 'this much!' even when they're not asked - we'll, I think its tacky. You could call that a snobby notion, but I think its genuinely polite not to risk offending someone who has less than you - or making someone who has more feel embarrased. And any habit, even one bordering on taboo, that helps people concentrate - in coversation at least - on what's really essential in life - like the weather, and children, and happiness, and not money - is good. One of the fortunate traits I picked up from my father was to eschew yakking about money and stuff, although in this respect I think he's let himself go late in life - perhaps he thinks I'm mature enough now to be bored without my consent. One bit regarding finances: the rental unit enables us to live in this style, which we would otherwise be unable to afford. That's all you get.

My favorite quote of the day, by H.L. Mencken:

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats"

While I normally take that as a (barely) metaphorical cry for revolutionary intellectuals to take action against the ideas & propaganda of the State and its corporate whores, it has a whole new meaning when you read the latest news about the Department of Homeboy Security:

U.S. Homeland Security Buys 450 Million Hollow-Point Bullets.

The new meaning here is to do with what Friedrich Hayek said of those working in government: "The worst rise to the top". That's why the government's domestic gestapo thugs are drowning in armament - they are threatened by Mencken's "normal man" who is feeling increasingly hemmed in, caged, oppressed and is buying guns of his own in record numbers, to defend himself from thuggery as police continue to fail in their monopoly duties to protect people - and guard against government depradations of his own rights.

To put things in perspective - only about 19 billion bullets were fired in WW2 - a terrible war that spanned the world, involved tens of millions, and raged for 6 years. Why on earth would the DHS need ~500 million bullets unless they feared that the state is loosing its grip against a rebelling populace?

On second thought, Hayek's quote is my favorite today, not Mencken's. Call it "The Cesspool Theory” – the biggest turds have a tendency to float to the top!

Remember Joe Cocker? There was a time in the late 1980s on MTV (when actual music was on that channel) when the woodstock movie would play late nights nearly every month. Joe Cocker was one of the highlights of that whole festival. He was raw and powerful - and the songs were not just great but double-great. He was the first star pop musician to cover other great pop songs in a twisted and wholly reinvented way - they were better than the originals. Other less popular musicians did "twisted" covers (e.g. Nina Simone), but Cocker's entire career was based on covers. Very unusual.

Fast-forward to 2012 and EVERYONE is a cover artist, espcially on Youtube. When I heard a podcast two years ago with Jack Conte (aka Pomplamoose) - this balding, mildly talented composer - explain how he and his girlfriend had quit their jobs for music and built a massive following just by posting creatively re-arranged covers of top 40 songs on Youtube - I thought "I've gotta do that". The covers got him attention for his original music, increased sales, etc. Great Success!

That podcast must've let the cat out of the bag - because now everyone is doing Youtube covers, and its very hard to break through now with this tactic, even if you've got a boatload of talent and and an ability to radically re-arrange and re-invent a pop song, as I do...if I say so myself.

My own cover songs - 4 so far, building toward a full album's worth - are certainly getting more attention than my purely original tracks on my Youtube channel, but I have yet to see even one go mildly viral yet.

Here's my catalog of covers so far, followed by some of my favorites from other Youtube artists. Please spread the word if you enjoy them:

The great libertarian economist Walter Block turned me on to the idea of "Evictionism" (a neo-logism of his own making) as the only sensible, rational solution to the abortion problem.

Typical Abortion Debate

1. Pro-life people are worried only with the rights of the fetus
2. Pro-choice people are worried only with the rights of the mother
3. Neither side concedes that that there is a clear rights conflict, nor is willing to think about how to resolve it equitably for both sides

Block makes some stringent asumptions before launching into his argument:

1. Life begins at conception (medical advances are inching closer to when the fetus will be viable outside the womb right after conception - ergo life begins then)
2. All human rights stem from property rights
3. Our most basic property is our own body
4. All (true) law is governed by the non-agression principle (the NAP), which states that no person is allowed to initiate violence against another
5. All retribution to agression must be proportionate to the crime (e.g. no gunning down simple backyard tresspassers)

Block's liberatarian argument is this:

1. A fetus owns her body
2. A mother owns her body
3. A fetus is a "guest" in her mother's body
4. If at any time, the mother decides her fetus is no longer welcome but is a tresspasser, she has the right to remove her
5. She must take all care to remove the fetus so as not to hurt it (proportionality of retribution), including inducing early labor and submitting the viable baby for adoption
6. If removing the fetus even in the gentlest manner results in her death, the mother is absolved from blame

Its really that simple. There is color and nuance that can be provided around all these points, but the cold hard syllogism I just listed is impossible to deny if you accept the assumptions.

What Pro-Lifers Get

Since medical science can now make a fetus viable outside the womb at 7 and even 6 months - all babies that are aborted after that time (millions?) would be immediately classified as homicide cases. This would give pro-lifers the recognition that they seek - that the fetus is a person with full rights of its own body.

What Pro-Choicers Get

A full acknowledgement and defense of the mother's legal rights to her body is what pro-choicers want. Evictionism is the only philosohpy that gives it to them. Medical science might eventually (in 200 years?) advance so far that a fetus will be viable outside the womb immediately after conception. Thus, in the future fewer and fewer abortions will be justifiable, until they eventually will be eliminated for the legal reasons listed above.

What Pro-Lifers Don't Get

They don't get a moral rule in law - i.e. a law requiring uwillinging mothers to sacrifice their bodily rights for an unwelcome fetus.

This is very important. True law - as shown in our simple and basic approach of Private Property+Non-Agression Principle - is limited only to prohibiting transgressions - not creating positive obligations. Most modern law-codes are overrun with these types of illegitimate "good samaritan" laws, buy they are nonetheless illegitimate.

The law cannot make us moral people. Indeed, a law requiring people to make morally good choices renders morality itself impossible, since to live morally one must be free to...choose! A choice not to be moral must always be allowed by law, so long as it doesn't violate our earlier principle against agression of property.

It may be morally questionable for a promiscuous young woman who - for example - uses early-term abortion as a method of birth control. But it mustn't be illegal if she has no other reasonable way to rid her body of the trespasser.

What Pro-Choicers Don't Get

They don't get carte blanche to treat the fetus however they wish - as they do now in America. They get their "mother's rights", but must acknowledge that the fetus isn't a mere "blod clot" that can be ripped out of the fetus at any time, and at whim. Evictionism would demand a new respect for life - once which pro-lifers have failed utterly in instilling.

Here's Professor Block explaining it all in brief, in his own charming way:

Bandcamp is great. I've discovered several great new bands just by browsing the site

I work in Rhode Island - on the 2-3 days per week that I'm "at the office". One week last summer I had a crazy late-afternoon meeting schedule, and an early morning meeting the next day. This happens 2-3 times a year. I usually get permission from the wife to stay the night in a local hotel, to avoid the 1+ hour commute back home to the South Shore of Massachusetts, only to turn around and go back early the next morning.

This one night last summer I was was stuck in a nasty extended-stay hotel in Warwick, RI (a $40 steal on priceline), pecking away at the computer, drawing my 50,000th large-scale system diagram for a technical meeting the next day with my client, my limp dick probably poking out the pee hole in my boxers, and listening to different punk bands on Bandcamp

Seahaven is a discovery from that night.

Here's my favorite song off their latest album Winter Forever:

To continue my first stab at real music criticism, here are some tangible reasons why its a great song:

1. Great production

Hate to begin every musical critique with "production", but its important. Every top dance pop song on the charts has 'great production' - its frequently the only thing standing between a shitty, forgettable song (which most of these pop songs are) and a ditty catchy enough to get stuck in your head for a few weeks one summer.

Save Me - like the rest of the songs on the album - have that thick, solid guitar spread you get in good pop punk like Green Day or Paramore. Full-spectrum stereo guitars, compressed vocals up in front of the sound, and a clacking kick drum that sounds across between Lars Ulrich's plywood sound and Nicko McBrain's thump.

2. Extended harmonies

Though it gets just a tad monotonous if you listen to the entire album, this one song on its own has an interesting use of "extended" 5ths - i.e. 9th chords. A "5th" is every rock guitar chord you've ever heard: Metalica's "chug chug", the Sonic Youth's "dink dink", Arcade Fire's "wank wank" are all based on that stupid 2-note guitar chord consisting of 1st finger and 3rd finger on the low end of the fretboard. The trick Seahaven's guitarists apply is to tack on a third note above this chord in the same interval. It results in two "stacked 5ths" which, if part of a more harmonically rich context, can almost sound jazzish. But if repeatedly used throughout a song as a consistent replacement for the conventional 5th-only chord, produces aninteresting and compelling harmony. Thickly distorted guitars only add to the effect, since the overtones produced by distortion ring in the same space as these added 5ths.

3. Medody + Harmony

That's what its all about, right? Rhythm helps. But in rock, the rhythm is pretty much a given. The melody in both the verse and bridge/chorus is just lovely, unconventional in just the right amount, and syncopated (off-beat) in just the right amount too. The way that melody hits the sweet and sour notes in each chord make the two a treat to hear.

As I've been trumpeting for a week now, I had an interview scheduled for today with legendary Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson. Before I say how it went, let me tell you a few stories about myself:

When I was 20 years old, staying with my older brother and his wife in Chicago in 1994, I drove Matt's 1989 VW Golf to a surf shop a few miles down the road in the city to buy a wetsuit. I was very into triathlons that year, and was competing in an open-swim race in Lake Michigan which was chilly even in late summer. And regardless a wet suit buoys you in the water, giving a speed advantage.

Well - I pulled a classic "Ben" - unlocking the car I left the wallet on the roof, got in and drove off without it. $100 and all my IDs and credit cards were gone.

Since then I've pulled this "absent minded Ben" move dozens of times. I've missed appointments, left purchased groceries at the store, lost the wallet in the house for weeks at a time, left the keys in a bathroom - you name it. I'm a legend in my family for this failing. I've kind of become resigned to it, and have just started writing off the loses as the cost of being Ben.

Fast forward to today.

I spent last night compiling my list of questions for Ian Anderson, some volunteered by my followers on twitter. And I tested my equipment to ensure I could record his incoming call in high fidelity. The only wrinkle was that the interview was at lunch time, and even though I work from home 2-3 days a week, my meeting schedule today had become boxed in so that I had to be in Providence, RI during lunch. But I have a mobile setup, so I packed my laptop, audio recording interface, microhpone etc. and brought it into the office with me. I scheduled myself a private, secluded conference room at the client site (I'm a consultant), and was setting up with 10 minutes till Ian's call when horror struck:

I had left the power adapter at home.

All this fucking prep. All this fucking hassle. And I left the fucking power adapter for this recorder at home.

I wanted to cut my fucking dick off. Ian was going to call and I had to say: "sorry Mr Anderson sir - I can't record this so I'm gonna let you go, and let this great opportunity to speak to a musical idol of mine slip away".

I sent an urgent email to his publicist who - thank god - received it and informed Ian not to call me. She's an absolute doll, was very understanding, and promised that I'd get a reschedule in June during the next press tour.

So - that's how the interview went. It went no where, and I'm never going to crow in advance about an opportunity like this, lest I publicly "pull a Ben" again.

Because its BORING. The debate, I mean.

This is a reprint of an editorial I published in the Boston Metro in 2004 (page 5) - back when the gay marriage debate was hot in Massachusetts. Lo and behold - foolish Americans haven't learned from my advice and are still embroiled in cultural war over this stupid and BORING issue. Left and right are still both wrong in the debate. And I can't express how BORING it has become listening to them repeat like parrots their same old illogical arguments. Its been 8 years now - wake up and smell the shit under your rhetorical noses, people.

The Gay Marriage Solution: Abolish it - 2-27-2004

When common sense rears its ugly head, who notices? Apparently none of  the hoarse-throated partisans in the gay marriage debate. You've seen them on the six o’clock news at the State House —conservatives making wise cracks about “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” progressives in opposition, but apparently unable to break their silly habit of rolling up mutually irrelevant issues into one protest — thus you get an “End Globalization” poster bumping up against a “Queer Power” one.

Under the surface of this fine democratic exercise, one can sense the emotion driving each side. Gay rights activists, spurred into action by the Massachusetts SJC ruling, smell blood in the prospect of a high-stakes, no-compromise, slam-dunk victory over social conservatives: an equal right to marry. Conservatives, confident that traditional marriage is so basic to our culture, were caught off-guard when asked to defend it. The argument against same-sex unions that “it just isn’t done” is flimsy at best, while appeals to the Old Testament prohibition against homosexuality (the one right along-side prohibitions against interracial marriages and cross-dressing) only work when preaching to the converted.

Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting John Kerry seemed closest to the elusive “middle way” when in a recent NPR inter view he suggested that perhaps it’s an issue of church-state separation: “Because marriage to many people is obviously what is sanctified by a church, it’s sacramental.” The fact that his official position — opposition to gay marriage, but support of civil unions — is a hedge owes more to election-year calculus than to his inability to put his own words into simpler form:

Abolish marriage.

Folks, this is the only way to satisfy everyone. Ask yourself: How did government get into the marriage business in the first place? Government-sanctioned marriage is a vestige of a time when the religious and civic authority were one and the same. Back in Bourbon France or Spain, to be married under the King’s law was to be married under God’s law, because the kingdom was God’s kingdom. But we have a curious situation now when we use the same eight-letter word to describe a holy church sacrament as well as a binding legal contract requiring the stamp of your local bureaucrat.

By abolishing the word “marriage” from our statutes and instead allowing civil unions for everyone, we could level the playing field without elevating the players. Straight couples could then get married at their local parish, and gays could have their commitment ceremony. But they’d all be equal legally. That would suck the heat right out of this culture war. Gay marriage proponents wouldn’t feel they were missing out on all the — ahem —fun of marriage, and religious conservatives wouldn’t feel that their sacred institutions could be struck down by a court of law. Of course, we’d then have have to start allowing non-romantic couples to get hitched — family members, business partners, conjoined twins — but that would be the only consitutionally correct thing to do. And with so many new couples uniting under the law, perhaps our society might even end up more a bit more civil.

In preparation for my interview with Ian Anderson this Friday I've re-aquainted myself with their classic concept album Thick as a Brick. The re-issue available on Rhapsody includes an interview three of the early members (including Anderson) from the 1980s recalling their experience writing, recording and touring the record. Here's the interview interspersed with concert clips and commentary from a dorky voice-over guy:

I confess to not having paid much attention to Anderson in media interviews. After listening to this piece, and seeing his other interviews on youtube I'm struck at what a non-boring, open & honest person he is. And defintely NOT full of himself. I'm quite sure the interview Friday will be enjoyable.

As I mentioned yesterday, Anne Leighton turned me on to some prog rock bands for my (infrequently updated) podcast site BandsLikeZappa.com. Since she also does publicity for Jethro Tull & Ian Anderson, I've gotten a slew of new Tull And Anderson releases frm her. The latest one is Thick as a Brick 2, Anderson's (not Tull's) personal concept album taking up where TAAB 1 left off in 1972.

Well, Anne dropped a bomb-shell on me when she offered me an interview with Anderson next week. I'm floored by the opportunity and agast at why I - with my little personal blog, and crappy podcast/vidcast sites - rank as a press contact worthy of such an gift. I think I just lucked out by being considerate and respectful to Anne and her other client before, and the connection has paid off. Lesson: be nice, considerate and helpful. It'll come back to you.

So - It'll only have 15 minutes with the great Ian Anderson and I need help with the following:

1. What do I ask him about?
2. How can I make the most of this opportunity for myself?

I'm working on a list of questions for #1 - which I bet he never gets from interviewers. They'll probably be hard-core technical questions about his compositional process, peppered with insightful observations meant to get his reaction, and perhaps butter him up with flattery for #2.

So what about #2?? Aside from asking his address so I can send him CDs (which I'm loathe to do) - how else can I make the most of this brief one-on-one time a great musician I admire?

Alt-prog rocker Steve Wilson - who is a also a skilled self-taught audio engineer - remixed Jethro Tull's iconic classic rock album Aqualung last year, with the cooperation of Tull maestro Ian Anderson.

Because I had featured Stratospheerius on my podcast site BandsLikeZappa.com - and because that band's publicist was also doing the US publicity for Anderson, I got a couple early release CDs from her. First of them was the Aqualung remix.

Despite being a massive Tull fan, I am like most radio listeners of the past 30 years have grown sick of the song Aqualung. It has been THE staple song on classic rock radio, and has thus been played to death, so much so that I never go out of my way to listen to it anymore, and will usually skip stations if I hear it on the rare occasion that I have the car radio tuned on.

Not that it isn't a great song - it surely is. That guitar riff is classic, the verse is pure excess, rhythmically bold and harmonically baroque. The middle section is sweet and sad, the faster middle section a telling blend of 60s & 70s folk rock, which makes sense given the epoch the album comes from (1971).

But the remix makes it brand new listening experience. To those untutored folk - we're not talking about Ian Anderson's voice set to a crappy dance beat and synth. This is an honest-to-goodness remix of the original master tracks.

A real remix involves taking all the separately recorded parts (pop music is normally recorded in separate takes, or if performed together at least in isolated rooms in the studio) and blending them together anew. Re-mixes are far more arduous and involved than re-masters, which are much more commonly done to revive old classic rock albums. Re-masters are just re-glosses and adjustments over the final stereo mix.

Steve Wilson is a very skilled mix engineer. He upped the volume in the album's title track, as well as all the tracks, by using some modern compression. This added punch - but not too much. In an era of obscenely over-compressed and over-loud rock music, Wilson's restraint is admirable.

He also improved the various ambient touches - the remote Ian Anderson vocal in that slow, sweet section in the song's middle is treated to some dry modern reverb. The classic "telephone" EQ effect to Anderson's voice here is done more subtly than the 1971 original.

Same goes for the rest of the album. Cross-eyed Mary - a Tull favorite of mine - benefits the most from the re-mix. This song is meant to be as heavy as hard-rock can be. The audio technology of 1972 could only do so much to convey this. Wilson's punchy, loud trreatment gives the song what it needed from the beginning.

Overall its a fantastic release. As an open-minded creative type, I was expecting and ready for a more radical, creative remix like the Beatles remixes of a few years ago. But Wilson's and Anderson's intent wasn't to do this, so they can't be faulted for avoiding it.