energy can be directed

Such as whether or not Mr. T really did eat your balls.
"Good enough" really is good enough for me most of the time. I am a man of simple tastes and few ambitions. Any penalties that my lack of competitive drive have incurred have been more than ameliorated by my sense of laid-back equanimity. It's when events disrupt my comfortable state of deliberate equilibrium that I get, well, whiny.

I was fine with the speed and performance of my current DSL service. It's easy to install and maintain, and hotswitching the router between PC and the Xbox can be done in a couple of minutes. Despite marketing propaganda's push to shame me as a narrow bandwith luddite, I've never been one to measure the size of my manhood in Mbps. The "bigger, badder, faster" mindset leads to things like Hummers, McMansions, and eventually total environmental and economic collapse.

For years I've been resisting the dinner-and-showertime robocalls from my ISP urging, nay browbeating, my wife and I to upgrade to FIOS. I didn't trust the pricing of the service, regardless of the front end deals offered. I had no desire to let some stanger into my house to screw around with the wiring. Most importantly, I definitely didn't want said stranger to fuck around with my carefully maintained computer and/or uploading company junkware onto it as part of some "special package."

Yet that's exactly what's going to happen tomorrow morning. Yeah, I know -- "Poor, poor Andrew having to suffer through the horror of having super high-speed internet service installed." It's still a pain in the ass, though, as I have to spend most of my day clearing space and cleaning the monumental clutter that has accumulated around my workstation over the past few years in order to give a person or persons unknown free access to my secret lair.

The Kings - Switchin' to Glide (from The Kings Are Here, 1980) - Does not include new wave installation surcharge, hooky parts and labor, or any applicable local taxes on synth usage.

Clarence Reid - If It Was Good Enough for Daddy (from Running Water, 1973) - Bring on the punch cards, rotary phones, and heavy-ass funk!

(If there's no post tomorrow, just assume something went catastrophically wrong.)

input/output

As I mentioned in the Firestorm post, our attachment to things from our childhood tends to be predicated on personal context (i.e. simple nostalgia or other associative factors) and the sad fact our younger selves lacked the capacity to know crap when they saw, heard, or ate it. That’s not a dismissal; it’s an important part of the growing up process, empirically developing internal filters to separate sheep from goats. It leaves splinters, though, pockets of exceptionalism that get carried into our adult lives.

For a many a kid who came of age in the Golden Era of Videogames (roughly 1977-1984), the 1982 movie Tron is something of a holy text. It’s innovative art direction, pioneering use of CGI, and excellent console and arcade game tie-ins perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the brave new world of digital entertainment.

As with other popular franchises of that period, there have been efforts -- a couple videogames, a comic book, and re-release the old toys -- to recapitalize on its magic as a means of parting nostalgic adults from their disposable income. None have been particularly successful, but the old affection still remains.

I consider myself a fan of the franchise (well, as much as a notorious stick in the mud can be a “fan” of anything), but I have a hard time getting around one bitter realization: the movie is a retread of old Christian epics, with light cycles taking the place of chariots. From the epistemological discussion of the relationship between the creator (“users”) and creations (“programs”), to Flynn’s godhood made digitally incarnate, to the mention of prophecies and portents, Tron is as much an theological delivery system as the Narnia novels are. Like my discovery of the ideology behind those C.S. Lewis books, the realization left a bad taste in my mouth.

It’s not the message so much as the oblique means of delivery. Despite being a “filthy little atheist,” I think Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments is a delightful film, even if I think the theology is a load of hokum. I’m less charitable when someone tries to slip some covert propaganda using the pretext of disposable entertainment. (This is also why I’ve never warmed up to vegetarian meat substitutes. If the food is tasty enough to justify eating it, it shouldn’t have to wear a mask.) Art is by definition manipulative, but I draw the line at being slipped an ideological roofie.

I won’t say the film has been spoiled for me (there’s that aforementioned exceptionalism in play), but it has diminished the film’s entertainment value by a noticeable degree. My love for the Wendy Carlos score remains unchanged, however. Now I just need to find a way to reconcile the film’s Christian undertones with friend Zartan’s shocking expose of Tron sex (Not a hoax! Not a slashfic!).

That article, along with the other many fine pieces he wrote for the late, lamented Zeroes Unlimited, was one of the earliest inspirations that eventually led to the creation of Armagideon Time. In honor of that, here are three obscure synth/new wave tracks that I think of as being the Tron universe equivalents to a Barry White LP.

JYL – Computer Love (from JYL, 1984)

The Metronomes – A Circuit Like Me (from a 1980 single)

The Units – Digital Stimulation (from Digital Stimulation, 1980)

The G.R.O.D.D. Initiative: Day 4 – hairless apes with technology

Today’s entry is on the short side, due to the fact that I’m writing this at the office, in between work assignments. My home machine has started to act a bit wonky, with XP choosing to revert my display settings out of the blue and my external hard drive forcing a reboot on hot-swapped power ups. I can think of several potential reasons why these things are happening, but in these days of cheap as dirt PC upgrades, it’s easier to swap in a bigger, better boot drive and work from a clean OS install.

In other words, tonight I’ll be too busy monkeying around with the install processes (and trying not to go ape shit over the inevitable complications) to write something more substantial from home.

The crusade must go on, however…

The Hellacopters – Monkey Boy (from Rock & Roll Is Dead, 2005) – Everything I’ve read about this band describes their sound as “garage rock,” but on this track I can hear echoes of Elton John’s rockier material from the seventies as well as snatches of Nick Lowe and Dave Edmund’s style of proto-new wave pub rock. Highly recommended.

Ian Brown – Dolphins Were Monkeys (Single Version) (from The Greatest, 2005) – If dolphins were monkeys, Sea World’s awesomeness factor would increase by a zillion orders of magnitude. I remember Ian Brown’s old outfit, The Stone Roses, being huge among the college set during my freshman year. Then they just sort of vanished off the face of the earth when the grunge fad hit.

I sense a rhythm that science can't feel

If the UPS website is to be believed, my shiny new PC should be arriving on my doorstep sometime tomorrow. It hasn’t been that long since my last upgrade, but my present box, a current gen Dell Dimension desktop, turned out to be a severe disappointment totally unsuited to a house with a high pet population. (The huge recessed cooling grill on the front may look cool in the ads, but only serves as a powerful cat fur magnet in practice.)

I was debating whether or not to scratch build a new machine, but I’m a lazy sort who vents his tech frustrations through violence toward inanimate objects. It’s very difficult to return an incompatible motherboard to CompUSA when it has been snapped in half and covered in bootprints. In the end, I compromised and went with a custom built machine, cutting corners by leaving out the parts I already have while optimizing the core components.

When all the swapping and tinkering is done, the new rig will be a Systemax box with a 3.4 GHz P4 processor, 2 GB RAM, a 256MB GeForce 7600 GS videocard, an Audigy sound card, a Memorex dual layer DVD burner, and three stacked HD with around 400 GBs of storage total. It may be a bit behind the curve, but it was very reasonably priced and will enable me to properly play Neverwinter Nights 2 and Oblivion without massively compromising on the gameplay and graphics.

Of course, this upgrade doesn’t effect Armagideon Time at all, except as the inspiration for today’s musical celebration of the new.

7 Seconds – New Wind (from New Wind, 1986) – Yeah, it’s a bit wussy, but it’s a positive, MassPIRG kind of wussiness with better music than the emo scene’s “nobody wuvs me” identi-drone nonsense.

Blitz – New Age (from the New Age EP, 1983, collected on Best of Blitz, 1994) – An interestingly odd bid for pop success from a punk/Oi! band’s whose earlier work included the violent terrace chants of “Someone’s Gonna Die” and “Razors in the Night.”

Boyskout – New Black (from School of Etiquette, 2004) – I came across a compilation of San Francisco “garage revival” bands not too long ago, and was a little puzzled to see a track from Boyskout on the disc. I’m assuming it had to have been a shared label or venue thing, because their sound has more in common with 4AD than fuzztones and farsifas.

INXS – Old World New World (from Shabooh Shoobah, 1982) – Poor Michael Hutchence…

Polysics – New Wave Jacket (from a 2001 Japanese single, collected on Polysics or Die!!!! 2005) – Black or black and white checks, no lapels, superthin collar with band buttons pinned to it. Or spasmodic Japanese noise pop. Either one will do.