Adventures In Binge-Watching

With all of my newly acquired free time, I've been able to watch several of the television series available on streaming services.  Since July 4th, I've watched Season 3 of Stranger Things and both Seasons 1 and 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  I've watched The Umbrella Academy and the cheesy Lost-wannabe iLand.  I've watched female-fronted dramedies like Dead To Me, Russian Doll, and the Emmy-winning Fleabag.  Recently, I watched the sublime Undone.

Last night, I wrapped up Season 1 of the anti-superhero series The Boys.  The premise of the show is that the superheros in an Avengers-like group called "The Seven" are basically terrible people, egomaniacs with utter contempt for mere mortal humans.  They're total shits, killing with impunity and laughing about it later, letting a plane crash simply because it's too much of a bother to individually rescue all the passengers, and setting new low bars in sexual harassment if not outright rape.  

The titular Boys are a group of four mortal men and one woman ("The Female") who, due to various reasons, hold well-deserved grudges and grievances toward The Seven and set out on the virtually impossible task of bringing them down.  The Boys are only slightly less immoral characters than The Seven they oppose, so the entire show is an exercise in anti-hero character development.  Do I cheer for the vain and impulsive drug addict, or the lying, sociopathic hit man?

It's no spoiler, but The Boys don't fully succeed in their mission, leaving several of The Seven to still be dealt with in the upcoming Season 2.

I've learned in my binge watching that it's basically best not to actually watch in binges.  If I watch, say, only one or at least no more than 2 episodes at a time each night, I think a little more about the series in between viewings and it sticks with me more.  If I instead try to watch all 8 to 10 episodes of a series in one or two long marathons, I find that two days later I've forgotten about almost the entire series.  

Binge-watching doesn't allow time to roll the plot and the characters around in your mind.  Binge-watching doesn't allow time to speculate about what may or may not happen next.  Binge-watching robs a series of much of its flavor.

Which would be a shame for The Boys, as there are a lot of intriguing characters to savor and lots of unexpected twists and turns in the plot.  I recommend watching the series, but only one episode a night.  But if you finish the penultimate Episode 7, I wouldn't blame you a bit if, like me, you go right straight through and also watch the final Episode 8.

NW Beltline Trail Through Tanyard Creek Park

It's not all fun and games here in retirementland.  I can't spend all day shouting at our so-called "president" on television, playing video games on my computer (when it's working), binge-watching Netflix, and trolling on Reddit.

The body needs exercise, and fortunately I live near a well-maintained multi-use trail (hiking, jogging, biking, etc.).  It's a small, disconnected part of the Atlanta Beltline, but I can get a three-mile walk in every day, as measured round-trip from my front door.

Three miles isn't a terribly long walk, but I can definitely break a sweat due to the lingering summer heat (after a brief cool spell, late September temperatures are still well up into the 90s every day).

The trail is varied enough to keep the walk interesting, and I can plug some earbuds into my old iPod and listen to different music each day to keep it varied.  

Here's some random scenes from along the trail.

Dreaming of the Masters

Supersonic Jazz, the first LP issued by Sun Ra's El Saturn label, was released in 1957 and recorded in Chicago the previous year.  The album was assembled from tapes recorded during a number of sessions at Chicago studios RCA Victor and Balkan, and several of the tracks had previously been released by El Saturn as singles. 

Although Sun Ra's musical voice and vision were starting to propel him away from the jazz mainstream, Supersonic Jazz reflects many of the prevailing bebop, Latin, and R&B conventions of the mid-1950s.  

El Is a Sound of Joy opens with a rolling tympani and cymbal, followed by Sun Ra and the band playing a moody, Ellingtonesque passage.  The songs then transitions to a hard-swinging section with hand-clapping and soulful riffs, allowing various band members the opportunity to solo over the theme.  Overall, with the soulful early hard bop sound and the Ellington tributes, the song sounds like it could have fit right in on Charles Mingus's 1959 album Mingus Ah Um.  The song is also the lead-in cut on the 1968 LP Sounds of Joy, which includes other early tracks form the Chicago sessions.

At the time of Supersonic Jazz, Marshall Allen had not yet joined the Arkestra, although longtime members John Gilmore and bassist Ronnie Boykins were already on board.  Julian Priester, who would go on to have a notable recording career of his own, is on trombone, and the gut-bucket baritone sax in the more soulful parts of El Is a Sound of Joy is by Pat Patrick.

Pat Patrick had studied music at DuSable High School in Chicago, where he met bassist Richard Davis and saxophonist John Gilmore.  Patrick first played in one of Sun Ra's bands around 1950 and became a regular member in 1954.  When the Arkestra moved from Chicago to New York in 1961, Patrick joined them and resided for several years in the Arkestra's communal residences in the East Village and later in Philadelphia.  He toured Europe with Sun Ra in 1970 and 1976, and was a frequent member of the Arkestra through 1988. 

Patrick also played with John Coltrane on 1961's Africa/Brass and appeared on several other notable jazz recordings.  

Fun fact: one of Patrick's children, Deval Patrick, went on to become Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

Un-fun fact: Patrick was apparently a terrible father.  In 1960, before moving to New York with Sun Ra, he left his wife and children, and when a four-year-old Deval chased after him while he was moving out of their apartment, Patrick slapped his son away.  Later, he refused to sign Deval's application to Milton Academy in Massachusetts, arguing that Deval would lose his African-American identity there.  Deval, whose tuition was paid by scholarship, was accepted anyway, and saw his father only rarely during his life.

If you play El Is a Sound of Joy all the way through above, you can hear the remaining cuts of Supersonic Jazz, and you can even reboot the gadget back to the beginning of the album and hear the LP from the start. 

You can also follow the links to buy a copy for yourself or send a financial contribution to El Saturn.

Kishi Bashi at Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, September 26, 2019

Second time seeing Kishi Bashi this year, after his record-release show in Athens back last June.  It wouldn't exactly break my heart to see him again this year; his shows are that good.

Like the Athens show, Atlanta's Takenobu opened, but unlike the Athens show, Takenobu wasn't also in Kishi Bashi's band, although the two musicians in Takenobu, cellist Nick Takenobu Ogawa himself and his violinist bandmate/fiancee, did accompany Kishi Bashi in his unplugged, among-the-audience encore.  But other than that, Kishi Bashi's band was the same as the Athens show, with his longtime accompanist/stage foil Tall Tall Trees (Mike Savino) and flutist/multi-instrumentalist Pip the Pansy.

I kept expecting Takenobu to play his great composition Exposition - he's played it in virtually every show of his I've seen - but to my surprise, he didn't, although he did perform several instrumental compositions and songs of equal virtue and complexity.

At his album release show in Athens last June, Kishi Bashi played every song from his terrific new album Omoiyori and in the same order as on the record.  It was a literal performance of the LP, with some older songs tagged on toward the end.   Last night, he opened with several songs from Omoiyori, which is a good thing because it's arguably his best record yet, but left plenty of time to cover songs from his previous three LPs.

What resulted was a great retrospective of Kishi Bashi's music, and gave ample opportunities for him to perform solo on stage, looping his guitar and beat boxing, like he used to do in the early 2010s at The Earl.  It allowed bandmate Tall Tall Trees to put down the bass guitar for a while and play his "space banjo", and thrill the audience with the drumming effects he produces with the instrument's body.  It gave Pip the Pansy, the rising star in the Kishi Bashi universe, time to play some show-stopping flute solos. It allowed time for some sweet, folky songs from his mid-career and for Kaoru Ishibashi to sing, to beat box, to play violin, to play keyboards, and to play acoustic guitar. They even brought back Mr. Steak to sing an appropriately cheesy rendition of I Had The Time of My Life and to let Kishi Bashi perform Mr. Steak's titular song.

In the lobby, the vendors were selling Mr. Steak socks.

Like last June, the band played their encore in the middle of the audience, unamplified, with acoustic instruments gently lifting Kaoru's voice over the audience.  It was a lovely several moments, as they played Annie Heart Thief of the Sea, followed by Violin Tsunami, and finally the lovely and intimate love song Summer of 42.

Here's a poorly-edited video of various selections from last night's set, unartfully mashed together into one video, to give you an idea of the variety of last night's show.

ROM Watches Entire Maguire Hearing So You Don't Have To

Not only that, but this Retired Old Man also found the time to watch the Lewandowski testimony last week, read the telephone transcript between the so-called "president" and the Ukraine, and even read the entire whistle-blower report released this morning.  I'm pretty up to speed on this thing.  Ask me anything.

What's shocking to me, on top of the shocking revelations regarding the so-called "president's" behavior, is how fast this thing is taking off.  There's a lot of pent-up frustration and anger on the Democratic side of the aisle, and the lid just came off the pot.

Putting together what I've learned, these seem to be the facts:

• The Ukraine has been at war along its eastern border with Russia for years now.
• The U.S. Senate voted to send some $350M in aid to the Ukraine.
• Our so-called "president" unilaterally froze that aid, and wouldn't even talk to the new president of the Ukraine until it was decided whether he would "play ball."
• When they finally did speak and the issue of military aid came up, our so-called "president" told the new president of the Ukraine that the U.S. had been very generous to the Ukraine, that the generosity hadn't been "reciprocal," and that he needed a "favor."
• That "favor" was to dig up some dirt on our so-called "president's" opponent, Joe Biden, and as long as he was at it, anything about Hilary Clinton's emails, because why not?.
• By requesting that, our so-called "president" solicited electoral assistance from a foreign power by means of coercion.
• Our so-called "president" also offered the assistance of the Attorney General and his personal attorney to the Ukraine for this matter.
• White House aides, recognizing the perilous position in which the conversation put our so-called "president," took the transcript of the conversation off of the usual server used to store such documents and moved it to a "secret server," usually used for top-secret info like codes, etc.
• This was not the first time that transcripts were moved to the "secret server," and other, as yet unknown records, are stored there.
• After Maguire's testimony, the so-called "president" was livid, and made terroristic threats against whatever American citizen gave information to the whistle-blower.

This would sound like bad dystopian fiction if it weren't true.  Even Richard Nixon, in all his corruption, never sank this low.

We live in interesting times.

This Is Historic

In the history of this republic, only two presidents have been impeached - Andrew Jackson (1868) and Bill Clinton (1998).  Neither were found guilty by the Senate or removed from office.  Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before he could be impeached and likely removed from office to avoid the indignity and embarrassment of the process.

As a result, in the nearly 250 years of this republic, most Americans never lived through an impeachment.  If we count Nixon's near-impeachment and Trump's likely impeachment, I'll have lived through three.

I was calling for impeachment of the current so-called "president" since the day he took office, based on violations of the emoluments clause.  Congress failed to  act even as one atrocity followed another, but now, in the third year of his so-called "presidency," I have mixed feelings.

Is it better at this late date for the Congress, the representatives of the People, to show their disapproval of the lawless and treacherous behavior of the "president" by impeachment, or should the American people directly speak at the ballot box in November of 2020?  

Given that not moving on impeachment would signal that there were no checks or balances on his behavior and virtually give the "president" licence to do whatever he wants for as long as he wants, and given that some of the issues surrounding the latest scandal involve the fairness if not the viability of the upcoming election, the balance is ever-so-slightly in favor of immediate impeachment, in my opinion.

I'm still an undecided Democrat - I don't yet have a preferred candidate from the field of contenders, but feel that any of them would do a better job than the incumbent.  Yes, even Marianne Williamson or Bill de Blasio (who technically is no longer even running).  Right now, I'm leaning toward Elizabeth Warren, but earlier I had favored Kamala Harris and then Pete Buttigieg.  My mind's still not made up.

My concern, though, is that this current scandal, involving the "president" withholding military aid to get the Ukraine to dig up dirt against potential opponent Joe Biden, is going to frame the political debate for the next several months, possibly even years, as Trump-vs-Biden, and in effect make Joe Biden the de facto  Democratic candidate.

I like Joe Biden - how could you not? - but frankly not as the next American president.  It's time for new blood and new ideas. To be honest, none of the front-runners on the Democratic ticket would ever be mistaken for "young," but Biden seems quite visibly older than any of them.  He has a place in the future of American politics, elder statesman, possible Cabinet position, but not President, again, in my opinion (which may change again - it's already changed twice).

The American political system cannot continue to let the incumbent run amok and ever closer to an imperial monarchy.  We are a nation of laws, and no one, not even the president, is above the law. The check has to be balanced, and Congress is right to start the impeachment process.  They should have started a long time ago.

The collateral damage, in addition to all the boost for Joe Biden, will be instability in the stock market.  The market doesn't like uncertainty, political or otherwise, and stocks will likely drop in value and at the very least not see much growth.  This effects me directly, as my retirement funds are directly related to interest on my IRA, but in the long run (should I live so long) everything tends to even out in the end and I (we) will eventually get through it.  

And if economic anxiety is the price I have to pay to get this man out of the White House, then where do I sign?

Such a Day!

It's been a historic day, one that will be recorded in history, for better or for worse.  After John Lewis' impassioned speech to Congress and Nacy Pelosi's press conference this afternoon, Congress is apparently finally (finally!) moving forward with impeachment hearings against our so-called "president."  Before the Republican gas-lighting totally obfuscates the issue and convinces the public that this isn't about the "president" at all but about Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, you might want to read this reporting on Hunter Biden that appeared in The New Yorker in July of this year.

But before all that drama sucks the oxygen out of the news cycle, let's take a moment to recognize Greta Thunberg's dramatic and emotional testimony to the United Nations.  I'm not sure which is more disturbing - Thunberg's apocalyptic warnings, or the vacuous UN audience clapping and cheering as if it wasn't precisely them that she was condemning.

"We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth - how dare you!"

If you aren't moved by this brief speech, you should examine what's wrong with your heart. 

On top of all that, sadly, veteran character actor and American treasure Sid Haig passed away yesterday

Good night, sweet prince.

Traitor

A list of 40 charges, with links to the supporting evidence, is provided here. They are all significant issues, but I would also add the following:

1. Mishandling and mismanagement of the response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico. 
2. The decision to reject the Paris climate accord. 
3. Invoking phony national security crises to start an ill-conceived and ineffective trade war with China. 
4. Taking money appropriated for the Pentagon to build his wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
5. Taking money directly and indirectly from foreign governments.
6. Use of executive orders to work around Congress.
7. Obstruction of justice in the Comey and other matters.
8. Violation of national security laws.   

I'm sure I can go on, but I think you get the point.

Undone

I can't recommend this television series highly enough.

If you have access to Amazon Prime, I strongly urge to watch the eight-episode Season 1 of Undone. Yes, it's animated, but in a hyper-realistic way - live-action actor were used for the performances, and the frames were rotoscoped into animated images.  It's a beautiful effect and more than just a gimmick - as the story unfolds, it becomes apparent why that approach was necessary to visually convey what the series is trying to do.

Episode 1 starts the series with an interesting but conventional story about a dysfunctional San Antonio family and lets the viewer adjust to the visuals.  But the plot doesn't really begin to unfold until Episode 2, and by Episode 3 you realize that the creators are swinging for a whole different fence than most other shows could conceive of even in their wildest dreams.  

The show is part slice-of-life domestic drama, part murder mystery (including the not-irrelevant mystery of whether there was a murder at all), and part inquisition into the fabric of time and space.  Also, like the best Philip K. Dick novels, it meditates on the question of what is real and what is schizophrenic delusion, and do those distinctions ultimately make any difference? 

Most of the plot lines are resolved by the end of Episode 7 but the creators add a transcendental Episode 8 to explore some of the effects of the Episode 7 revelations.  By the end of the final Episode 8, I can't imagine there being a Season 2 - the show is so original and the story so complete unto itself, like a snow-globe world untouched by the outside universe, that there's really nothing more to be added, despite the ambiguous Birdman-like final shot.

Undone shows what streaming television is capable of achieving.  The eight 30-minute  episodes are too long for a movie but too short for a network series, especially considering the difficulty of conceiving the possibility of a Season 2.  It's a little too cerebral and edgy even for HBO, so I'm glad that it finally found a home on Amazon Prime, where it can run forever for anyone ever interested in exploring it.

Short version: good show.

Dreaming of the Masters

 

If you haven't guessed by now, I was a huge Sun Ra fan back in the '70s.  I lived in New York for the first half of the decade and was lucky enough to have caught Sun Ra performances at several Manhattan and Long Island venues.  I moved to Boston for the second half of the decade, and did my best to catch every Sun Ra performance in Beantown I could while I was a student at BU.

Imagine my excitement, then, when it  was announced that Sun Ra would perform a 12-night stand in December 1978 at the Modern Theater in downtown Boston. This was during the collegiate winter break, when all the other students left town to return home and celebrate the holidays with family, and I had no exams, classes or other pressing responsibilities.  To make it even more enticing, the 12 Days of Infinity, as the series was called, was to feature a light show produced by something called the Outerspace Visual Communicator (OVC).  Bill Sebastian, the inventor of the OVC said, “I can’t guarantee anybody is going to like what they see here, but I can guarantee they haven’t seen anything like it before."

I wanted to attend all 12 of the Infinity nights (that would have been epic) but could only afford to go to three of the shows on my student budget. 

Built in 1900, the Modern Theater (523 Washington Street) was where Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, the first motion picture with sound, premiered in Boston.  But by the 1970s, the Modern had fallen on hard times, and like its neighbors the Paramount and the Savoy, the Modern was in desperate need of rehabilitation. In 1976, the building was purchased by a non-profit, and by late 1978 the theater was restored to the point where it could stage the Sun Ra performances.

The OVC was basically an approximately 20-feet tall hexagonal structure that loomed behind the Arkestra and dominated the stage.  It containing dozens of smaller hexagonal lights which could change color individually, either in sequence with other lights around it or all by itself.  The effect was not unlike a very large, psychedelic honeycomb.  Sometimes, the colors would create intricate geometric patterns and other times they displayed washes of light; sometimes all the lights flashed in unison and other times they went from being uniformly lit to colors appearing only in certain sections.  It was cool, but for those of us who had seen the Joshua Light Show at the Fillmore or similar displays at other rock shows, it was somewhat pedestrian.  The OVC did not upstage the Sun Ra performances and the whole run would still have been epic even without the added attraction of the OVC light show, although the OVC definitely was a prominent part of the performances and my memories of those shows.

The photos of the Arkestra on the back jacket of The Other Side of the Sun LP were taken during the 12 Days of Infinity and show the OVC in action, although the album is actually a Soho studio recording from November 1978 and January '79.

Dude, I Was There!

The OVC was not programmed like a computer but instead was operated like a musical instrument live on stage by inventor Bill Sebastian himself. Sebastian was a Dallas native who played piano and came north to study politics at MIT during the late 1960s. He became a political activist in the early 1970s, but when he heard Sun Ra playing in Boston in 1973, his life changed. Although he knew nothing about electronics, he spent the next five years and $100,000 constructing the OVC as a way to visualize Sun Ra’s sounds. When Sun Ra saw the OVC for the first time in Sebastian’s Boston loft, he reflected on the “infinite number of vibratory ratios” and made Sebastian a member of the Arkestra on the spot. 

In the 1990s, Sun Ra unveiled a new “OVC-3D,” an improved version of what I had seen in Boston in 1978, unrestrained by  the hexagonal tiles of the former and utilizing the computer technologies that had emerged in the meantime.  A video for Calling Planet Earth contains footage of the new, improved OVC-3D,  although the video obviously contains additional post-production effects to make the whole thing even more mind-bending.

December 1978 also saw the debut of the remake of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, starring Donald Sutherland.  During the 12 Days of Infinity, I went to a matinee screening of the film with my girlfriend, partly as a way of rewarding her for going to the Sun Ra shows with me.  The movie was fun and scary, just as we had been hoping it would be, but walking out of the dark theater and into the daylight of the New England winter, we saw Sun Ra and members of the Arkestra leaving the movie at the same time as us.  We had just watched Body Snatchers with Sun Ra!  We had been sitting in the same dark theater together for the past two hours!  They were all dressed in full Afro-futurist attire - it was my third time seeing Sun Ra in public, and he was never out of character as far as I know.

I approached Sun Ra and asked for reassurance that people on Saturn don't behave like those in the film we had just seen.  He smiled and waved a hand enigmatically, and walked off without saying a word.  That may sound rude or aloof, but he had an air and a grace about him that the gesture seemed to communicate more - although I know not what - than any words could have conveyed.  

Let's Talk About the Weather

Let's talk about anything other than computer problems!  

2019 has been a hot year and it's been a hot summer.  Here in Georgia, it's been a hot September - it seemed Summer was insistent on broiling the South for as long as it was still officially "summer."  Almost every day, we had temperatures in the high 90s with humidities to match.  It was brutal.

All that ended yesterday.  Suddenly, just like that, the temperatures fell and we've enjoyed temperatures in the balmy 70s the past two days.  No big storms or fronts passed through - it was just a matter of waking up Thursday morning to a comfortable climate.  Time to open a window and enjoy, rather than endure, being outdoors.

Today was also the Global Climate Strike.  As the Times put it, "Anxious about their future on a hotter planet and angry at world leaders for failing to arrest the crisis, masses of young people poured into the streets on every continent on Friday for a day of global climate protests. Organizers estimated the turnout to be around four million in thousands of cities and towns worldwide." 

It was the first time so many children and young people marched in so many places around the world. Police estimated that a combined 300,000 participants marched in Berlin, Melbourne, and London. In New York City, an estimated 60,000 people marched  in Lower Manhattan. Nearly 1,000 people gathered outside the State Capitol in Atlanta for the protest. 

For my part, I took my usual every-other-day stroll along Tanyard Creek and the Beltline Trail.   It  was nice to enjoy the hike for once without worrying about heat stroke.  It was also nice not to have to rush the morning and get out before the temperatures got too high - I walked when I felt like it, which turned out to be between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m., followed by a late lunch.

Human-scale temperatures, a working computer - ah, life is good again! 

Annals of Computing

I got back from Onyx Computing less than an hour ago, and I can now finally take my victory lap - the computer is finally fixed, this time for real and for good, and I even have a warranty and guarantee, just in case.

New, cracker-jack fast, solid-state hard drive makes the laptop even better than when I first purchased it, so the cost for the repair, which by the way was $55 less than the estimate, was worth every penny.

My existential crisis (how can I lead my post-retirement life without a powerful computer?) is now averted.

I don't really need much. I have a pile of bricks up on a hill to call "home" and a nice walking path (the northern Beltline segment) near my house for exercise.  I have a supermarket, liquor store, good pizza (Fellini's), and a dive bar nearby, walking distance if necessary. Although most of my friends are usually busy with jobs and family and things like that, or now live/work out-of-town (OTP to way OTP), at least I still have friends, so there's that.

Meanwhile, the only other things I need are high-speed internet and a machine capable of accessing that high-speed internet.  I need access to this blog and to social media; to Spotify for music; YouTube for music, gaming tips, and cat videos; and various news sites to keep me up to date on the world beyond these bricks.  I need access to NetFlix and Amazon Prime for general entertainment purposes. I also need Steam and video games to keep me entertained, to divert my attention, and to waste away time when music, videos, television, and news don't cut it.  If I have all that, I'm good.

And I like it all available together, in one place, and in the format to which I am accustomed.  Maybe I'm stuck in my ways - too bad - but if home computers are McLuhanesque extensions of our minds, I don't like my mind scrambled up, or changed, or different.  I like my portal the way I've got it all set up now and in the way I've enjoyed it for the past several years, and I don't want it to change.  So I need my computer - this computer - to keep working and working in the way that it's currently set up.

And thanks to the boys down at Onyx, it looks like I'm good, at least for the foreseeable future.

Annals of Computing

For a glorious 48 hours, it appeared that I had repaired my laptop.  Then this morning, it was all foobar again.   It appears I ran yesterday's victory lap too soon.

The pros have it now.  They've already diagnosed the problem (failing hard drive) and expect to have the computer back to me with a new, improved solid state HD tomorrow, plus whatever other problems they diagnose.

I already feel so much better knowing the computer is now in professional hands.  Note to self: next time this happens (and there will be a next time, I'm sure), just take it in to the shop first thing, and stop pretending you're an IT expert.

Annals of Computing

I'm not exaggerating or being overly dramatic when I say that the past week of computer problems had put me into a really dark place.  As I said yesterday, the week-long attempt at repairs was humbling, frustrating, humiliating, scary, and lonely.

What was it that Marshall McLuhan once said about media being an extension of our senses?  How television is an extension of our eyes allowing us to see further and radio an extension of our ears?  In keeping with that logic, computers are an extension of our minds, and having my laptop go down felt like my mind was crumbling.  Think HAL in the film 2001.

But not only did I fix it, I think I even found the underlying reason that my computer was slowing down to a crawl to begin with.  In one of the many resources I looked at on line, I learned that a recent Microsoft patch for the "new build" of Windows 10 that I installed back in July has a bug of its own that for some reason turns Cortana, Microsoft's largely ignored voice-recognition assistant, into a CPU hog.  Others who had the patch reportedly experienced the same problem as me, and Microsoft had to issue a bulletin acknowledging the problem.

The solution may have been to simply delete that one patch (the fix was worse the the original problem) instead of resetting the entire OS, but I didn't learn that until afterwards.  I checked to see if Update KB4512941 was still in the list of updates and it wasn't - which is probably why I'm not suffering that problem any more.  

If you have Windows 10 and are concerned about this issue, go to "Settings," select "Update & Security," and then click the box that says "View Update History."  A list of all the patches will appear and you'll need to manually search for Update KB4512941.  If you find it, there's an "Uninstall Updates" option at the top of the page.  

Or you can go nuclear like I did and reformat the whole operating system back to it's original state and delete every app and program on your hard drive.  

Or you can do what I was tempted to do a couple of times and turn off the computer, close the cover, place it in your car, drive to the ocean, and throw it in.  

I know you're supposed to responsibly recycle your electronics, but screw it.

Other Types of Crashes

Another tree down in the neighborhood.  This one fell about two properties away from mine, and fell for no apparent reason - no rain, no high wind, no drunk drivers or out-of-control vehicles.  It apparently simply decided it was just time to come crashing down, and it's surprising it didn't hit a house or at least a car as it fell.  Despite the errant strike of this particular tree, Atlanta's arboreal murder spree continues . . . 

The IT Desk is pleased to announce that yesterday's third-time's-a-charm attempt to fix this computer was a success - we've been up and operating for 24 hours now, well past the 60 minutes of functionality that marked our previous attempts at repair.  I mentioned "third time" there, but in actuality it was the third time trying the particular repair that eventually worked (resetting the Windows 10 OS back to it's original state and deleting all the apps, programs, and games I've accumulated since 2016).  I backed everything up before the system reset and am now reloading the software that I want, but it's a more tedious process than I expected, and for some reason nothing seems to reload correctly on the first attempt.  Before performing the reset, I had been trying a variety of other fixes, unsuccessfully fooling around with an uncooperative machine since last Wednesday morning.  Five days of futility.

The process was humbling because it kept reminding me how little I actually know about computers, and frustrating because in my ignorance, nothing seemed to work.  

It was also a little humiliating because it kept reminding me how much of my newly retired life I spend just entertaining, amusing, and distracting myself with this computer.  

And it was more than a little scary because this piece of hardware is all that connects me with my bank account, my retirement funds, my Social Security, and my Medicare.  

Finally, it made me feel lonely because it proved that this device has somehow become my closest friend and most trusted adviser.  

I wasn't kidding around about being kind of freaked out on Friday the 13th.

But at least I now have a working computer once again.

Annals of Computing

It looks like I spoke too soon when I updated last Thursday's post saying that I fixed my computer problems.

After I had updated the Windows 10 OS with all of the latest patches and fixes, my computer, this computer, ran fine for about an hour, and then started slowing down again, reverting to the same unusable, snail's pace speed as before.   Every time I rebooted, there would be a small window of time that the computer was functional before it would bog down again with whatever it was that was bogging it down.

So I had no choice but to go for the nuclear option - what did I have to lose?  I performed a complete system update, totally erasing everything and reinstalling the Windows 10 OS to the way it was when the computer was first purchased.

At it's slow speed, it took the computer all day yesterday, including over all of  last night, to complete, but I was finally able to restart my computer this morning, and it took over an hour to set up Windows all over again.

So far, it seems to be working well, but I still can't tell if the problem is really fixed or if I'm still in that post-reboot sweet zone where it runs at normal speed. Time will tell, but it does seem to be working better that it has the past few days, even during the post-reboot periods.

Time will tell, but this whole process has been nerve-wracking and frustrating.

Update:  Grrrrrrrrr!  Dagnabit!

Update II:  The third time seemed to be the charm.  Nuclear option: complete system reboot, annihilating all programs, apps and features on the hard drive and reverting back to just the original OS on the original hardware.  Just like the laptop was when it first came out of the box.  Four hours later, everything's still running well. Not gonna do a victory lap yet, but it looks like I finally solved the problem.

Dreaming of the Masters

Last week, we payed respect to Sun Ra sideman Marshall Allen.  After that, it's only logical to also pay a tribute to Sun Ra's other notable sideman - the late, great tenor saxophonist John Gilmore.

Gilmore was prodigiously talented. His style usually gets more comparisons to John Coltrane than to any other musician.  There are those who've mourned that he fell into Sun Ra's orbit and never reached a wider audience; however, that kind of thinking not only trivializes Sun Ra's accomplishments but overlooks the many times Sun Ra showcased Gilmore's playing on his records and during live performances. 

Also, it ignores the fact that Gilmore did in fact play with other ensembles and with other bands. Above is a video of John Gilmore playing with Art Blakey's band, with Lee Morgan (who later got shot dead in Slugs Saloon in lower Manhattan in the early 70s) on trumpet. Victor Sproles (who also played with Sun Ra) on bass, John Hicks on piano, and, of course, Art Blakey on drums.

In the Rough Guide to Jazz, Brian Priestley says:

Gilmore is known for two rather different styles of tenor playing. On performances of a straight ahead post-bop character (which include many of those with Sun Ra), he runs the changes with a fluency and tone halfway between Johnny Griffin and Wardell Gray, and with a rhythmic and motivic approach which he claims influenced Coltrane. On more abstract material, he is capable of long passages based exclusively on high-register squeals. Especially when heard live, Gilmore was one of the few musicians who carried sufficient conviction to encompass both approaches.

Brilliantly, Gilmore presents both styles in this composition, and Lee Morgan doesn't hold much back either. 

Here's a short interview with Gilmore, along with a snippet of a performance with Sun Ra.

Friday the 13th

Annals of Computing

Why does this keep happening to me?

For some reason, I have a history of computers catastrophically crashing on me.  Back in 2012, my hard drive crashed and I was lucky that the IT team at the local computer repair shop were able to retrieve at least some of the data, most notably the report for a project I had been working on for a client for the previous several months.  In addition to considerable embarrassment, the loss of that file would have cost me several thousands of dollars, both in lost revenue and in compensatory time to recreate the effort for which I had already billed the client.

I wasn't so lucky when the hard drive on my next computer crashed in 2016.  They weren't able to recover anything from that hard drive, and I lost all of my hundreds of gigs of music files and my entire directory of digital photographs, the visual document of the prior two decades of my life. Fortunately, there were no revenue-generating documents on that particular hard drive on that particular day, but I irretrievably lost everything else and learned an important lesson on how much of our lives (and livelihood) is bound up in these electronic devices.

After that, I finally got an external hard drive for backup (thanks, Britney!) along with another new computer, my third since 2012.  It was running great - it's a super-powerful, gaming laptop - until just about the time I retired last June.  No data was lost in a hard drive crash, but it wouldn't start up properly and I couldn't access my files or any apps.  I thought it was a hardware problem, but the boys down at the IT shop (whom I've gotten to know pretty well by now) told me I only needed to replace the OS with the newest build of Windows 10.

That solved the problem, although there was a little drama due to my own operator error during the upgrade (I lost/misplaced all of my stored passwords), but with the new OS installed, the 2016 laptop ran great - just like new, if not even better.

Until yesterday.  After a normal day of use and functionality on Tuesday, I went to start up the computer Wednesday morning and was greeted by the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.  After an excruciatingly long 15 seconds, the start up screen finally appeared, but it took an inordinately long time for it to accept my password, and once it did, the screen suddenly went black.

I rebooted and had the same results (slow, laggy startup, followed by blackness).  But after a few minutes, text appeared at the bottom of the screen stating "Diagnosing Problem," so I went and got a cup of coffee and let the computer figure it all out by itself.  When I returned, the screen was still black, but the text said, "Repairing Damaged Drive - May Take An Hour To Complete," so I left it by itself to self-repair what ever the problem was.

It used every minute of the forecast one hour to complete the repair, and then some.  But by noon, the computer was finally operating, but that's when I discovered that it was operating extremely slow.  It would take 60 seconds to open a window in Google Chrome and even longer to open any other app.  The computer was, in a word, unusable, at least if you didn't want to wait five minutes every time you clicked something to see what would happen next.  I rebooted several times, and on each successive reboot, it seemed to only operate slower than before.

You might think I've got it fixed by now - how else am I writing this if not?  - but this post is being composed, just like yesterday's post, on the old laptop that crashed in 2016 (I had a new hard drive installed, and kept the computer around as a contingency for just this kind of event).  But this old laptop still has its issues - an old Windows 7 OS, no gaming capability, and a damaged screen hinge that won't allow the laptop to be closed.  It's better than nothing, but why do my computers keep failing on me?

Does this happen to everyone, and they just don't talk about it? I don't see a constant litany of complaints on social media about crashed computers, and my friends and colleagues haven't mentioned similar problems over the course of these events.  I must be doing something wrong, but I honestly have no idea what.

The other computer, the powerful, gaming laptop, is still self-diagnosing right now.  It's going through all of the troubleshooting and self-correcting functions built into the Windows 10 OS, but each step is slow as molasses and takes literally hours to complete.  Disturbingly, the "System Check" reported that everything's fine - no problems here! - so I don't feel confident that I'm going to get this thing self-corrected.  If all else fails, I'll re-install Windows 10 again (after safely securing my passwords first) and if that doesn't work, it's back to the boyos at the IT shop.  

Good thing I'm retired and now have the time for all of this shit.

Update: 7:45 p.m.  - Fixed it!  Downloaded an update to Windows 10.  It took forever to d.l.  and even longer to install, but once it did, everything was running smooth again!

Personal History

Back when I was in my late 40s, I attended a seven-day Zen meditation retreat at Lake Allatoona, a man-made lake formed by a dam on Georgia's Etowah River (there are no natural lakes in Georgia).

By my count, I've attended four such seven-day retreats and a larger number of three- to four-day day retreats, and this was my second.  I bring up numbers not out of any sense of accomplishment but simply to demonstrate that I was familiar with the dynamics and rhythms of retreats of this kind, and while no master, I knew what I was getting into.

Typically, a seven-day retreat starts with a certain number of people and that number decreases as the retreat goes on.  But after about Day 4, the participants are winnowed down to the hard-core adherents, the die-hards who will stick it out to the very end.  It's unusual to lose many participants after Day 4.

On Day 4 of this particular retreat, a Tuesday (we had started on Saturday), we began our 10 to 12 hours of daily meditation before dawn, as per the usual custom.  We sat in mediation from 5:00 a.m. until 6:00, with five minutes of silent walking meditation (kinhin) halfway through.  Breakfast was eaten in relative silence (talking was not forbidden, but idle chit-chat was discouraged), followed by "free time" for personal hygiene and bodily maintenance, and mediation resumed at 7:30 a.m.

As per the daily schedule for this retreat, morning meditation ended at 10:30 a.m. for the daily dharma talk and lesson.  After completing three-and-a-half days of intensive meditation, my mind was quite still and quiet.  To the outside eye, I probably appeared "relaxed," but internally it felt less like a state of leisure than one of quiet acceptance of the world as it was at that moment, and separate and apart from my desires and expectations of things.  To be honest, I also was probably feeling a little bit smug, a self-congratulatory satisfaction that it appeared that I was going to make it through the crucial Day 4 of the retreat, and that I was therefore likely to make it all the way to the Day 7 finish line.  

The morning dharma talk usually began with a few announcements and program updates, such as afternoon work detail will be moved indoors today due to forecast rain, or a kind patron will be providing dinner this evening but it might be arriving a little later than usual.  Boring, insignificant little details like that. So imagine my surprise when the teacher announced that according to a bunch of emails and text messages he had received that morning, the United States was under terrorist attack and that we would be postponing the dharma talk and all other planned activities to allow the retreat participants to call home and make sure that family and loved ones were safe and out of harm's way.

Day 4 was on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

The violent events of the day probably seemed even more surreal from the calm, peaceful perspective of a Zen meditation retreat than it did to most other Americans as they followed the events on line or on television. The announcement seemed so unbelievable that it even occurred to me that it might be some sort of Zen trick, a test of our composure and equanimity, and I had to go sit in my car for a while and listen to A.M. news radio before I was convinced that it was all real, all too real.

As was suggested, I called home and made sure that family members in Boston were unaffected.  They were fine, although flight plans had been interrupted due to the grounding of the entire commercial airline fleet.  After a few hours of phone calls and radio confirmation, we all returned to the main building of the retreat center in time for the noontime meal.

We discussed whether to terminate the retreat so that everyone could go home and deal with whatever matters needed to be dealt with, including comforting family, friends, and significant others.  A few did just that, and left the retreat to head home, and we lost more participants than usual for a Day 4.  Others of us, including myself, lived alone and there was nothing really to accomplish by leaving, so about a half-dozen of us decided to stay and see the retreat through to Day 7, despite the horrific events of 9/11.  The teacher, who probably expected everyone to bail, seemed pleasantly surprised that we had chosen to stay, and sat with us through the rest of the retreat.

While everyone else in America, at least as I imagine, was watching video footage of the plane colliding with the World Trade Tower over and over again on television, listening to political commentary on CNN and over talk radio, and working themselves up into a patriotic and Islamophobic lather, I and a half-dozen like-minded others spent the days off the grid, practicing 10 to 12 hours a day of silent meditation, deepening our practice, and cultivating a sense of equanimity and loving-kindness.  The contrast between my state of mind and the world I encountered when I finally returned to work the next Monday morning could not have been more profound.

I had been spared exposure to all of the increasingly hysterical calls for revenge and the speculations of "why do they hate us?"  While I was at a point of maximal calmness and acceptance, I was in a nation busily and angrily preparing itself for war.  I couldn't have been more out of touch with the mood of the nation.  

I saw the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan as more or less inevitable. After the events of 9/11, someone's going to get bombed - America's going to go to war, like it or not, I reasoned.  At the time, I considered myself a generally apolitical "compassionate conservative," but I lost whatever support I had left for George W. Bush when he later invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation clearly unrelated to the terrorist attacks.  My disappointment in Bush and the two wars led to support in the next presidential election for Bush's opponent, John Kerry, and finally to a full-hearted embrace of progressive values and liberalism by the time Barack Obama ran for office in 2008.

Our Zen retreat did not include any patriotic ceremonies or other secular activities, and following that disorienting Day 4 discovery, we didn't talk much about what came to be known as 9/11, but it couldn't be avoided either.  The elephant in the room.  

Of the retreat participants who stayed until the end, one was a Colombian woman and another a younger, male student from France.  Fortunately for us, the two adopted the role of head chefs during the retreat. Once, while they were preparing the evening meal, I overheard them talking about the attack.

"The United States has to learn respect for the rights of other nations," the French student was saying.  "They can't keep crossing international borders on military expeditions into other lands."

"That's right," the Columbian woman agreed.  "It was just a matter of time before something like this occurred." And then she added, "I'm glad it happened."

Those would have been fighting words almost anywhere else in America at that time.  But hearing that argument then, my mind already in a still, peaceful place after so many days of mediation, I just let my own feelings go - there was nothing to be gained from jumping into the thorny thicket of international politics.  I asked if any vegetables needed chopping before dinner.

"No treaty of peace shall be held valid in which there is tacitly reserved matter for a future war.  Otherwise, a treaty would be only a truce, a suspension of hostilities but not peace, which means an end to all hostilities - so much so that even to attach the word "perpetual" to it is a dubious pleonasm."

- Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (1795)

From The Sports Desk

An alternative title to this post could be Retired Old Man Spends Entire Saturday Watching Sports on TV.  

There's a lot to report here and it's almost all good news, but the Sports Desk's basic dilemma is that either a) you already know all this because you're interested in sports and we've nothing new to tell you, or b) you're not interested in sports and therefore don't care what we have to say about yesterday's games.  But the Sports Desk has to get it off their chests (there's really no restraining them at this point), and even though they've got their own little blog, here they go again on this one.  

We'll get the bad news out of the way first.

The Red Sox lost yesterday.  To the Yankees.  In Fenway Park.  The reigning World Series champions are now mired in third place in the AL East, 16.5 games behind New York, and seven games back in the wild-card standings.  With 20 games left to the season, it's still mathematically possible that they could make the playoffs, as four of those remaining games are against Tampa Bay, who currently lead the wild-card race. If Boston wins those four games AND somehow manages to win three more of the remaining games than does Tampa Bay, they could qualify as the wild-card team . . . and then in all likelihood probably lose to the Yankees in a seven-game playoff series. 

But it's still a chance, a hope, even though it's obviously not the Red Sox' time, despite last year's World Series triumph. But things are definitely looking a lot better for the reigning Super Bowl champion New England Patriots.

In one of the biggest sports stories of the year, the Patriots acquired former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver and punt returner Antonio Brown.  As you probably know, Brown led the NFL in receiving yards in 2014 and 2017, and was the first player in NFL history to have more than 1,000 yards receiving and returning in the same season.  However, his relationship with the Steelers, especially QB Ben Roethlisberger, had soured and earlier this year he requested a trade. He wound up in Oakland, where the Raiders made him the highest-paid receiver in the league, but yesterday, following several off-field incidents, including a confrontation with the team's GM, the Raiders released him before he had played even a single regular-season game. The Patriots had tried previously to sign Brown, but Pittsburgh refused to trade him to their AFC rival, so New England snapped him up as soon as he became available early yesterday afternoon.

This is huge news, and the already talent-rich Patriots just got that much better. The thought of Tom Brady aiming one of his perfectly-spiraled passes toward a receiver as talented as Antonio Brown should send shivers down the spines of the rest of the league.  The deal hardly seems fair to those other teams, those mere mortals toiling along the sidelines of the league, and the usual on-line commentators are already cooking up the conspiracy theories that inevitably go along with anything the Patriots do. New England didn't have to give up any draft choices to get Brown, while Oakland had to give up two to Pittsburgh for the "privilege" of having him abuse the team for the whole off-season and then go running off to play for a better team.  Was this all a brilliantly choreographed plot by New England to acquire Brown from the very beginning?  Was there, dare we say it?, collusion between Oakland and New England to steal him away from Pittsburgh? 

We look forward to hearing all these conspiracy theories and more in the months ahead, but right now, Pittsburgh must be so mad over losing their star receiver to their arch-rival for so little compensation.  They must be dying to take out their frustration on the Patriots.  When do the two teams get to play and take it out on each other on the field?  Let's take a look at the schedule and see . . . there it is!  Tonight! The play each other tonight! Unfortunately, Antonio Brown is ineligible to play in the game (he didn't make the roster in time), but there's going to be a lot of open hostility in this already contentious match up, beyond the usual Brady-vs-Roethlisberger hype (friendly reminder that Roethlisberger has been accused of sexual assault on multiple occasions and was suspended for 4 games in 2010 and ordered to undergo "professional behavior evaluation."  Nice guy).  Should be a good game to watch.

But enough about pro sports - Saturday afternoon was spent watching college football, and the University of Georgia Bulldogs demolished Murray State 63-17 yesterday.  Murray State played surprisingly well and even put a little scare in the Dogs in the 1st Quarter by tying the game up at 7 points, but Georgia responded with a 35-point 2nd Quarter and never really looked back from there.  QB Jake Fromm didn't even play the second half and finished the day at 10-for-11 with 166 yards and one TD.  

Former Bulldog Justin Fields had a much better day at Ohio State, beating Cincinnati 42-0 and going 20-for-25 and 224 yards, with two TD passes and two rushing TDs.  The Sports Desk wonders how long Fields will have us in the unusual (for us) position of cheering for Ohio State.

Former Bulldog Jake Eason didn't fare as well at Washington, which lost to California by a single point, 20-19, after a last-second field goal by Cal.  Eason went 18-for-30 and 162 yards, was intercepted once and sacked three times.  A rough day to be sure, but they still almost won, if not for that one late field goal.

Finally, in probably the best game yesterday, the sixth-ranked LSU Tigers went to Austin and beat ninth-ranked Texas, 45-38.  The Austin crowd was amped up, loud and confident, Matthew McConaughey was there on the sidelines cheering the Longhorns on, and the Texas fans even taunted the entire SEC with reminders of Coach Tom Herman's past wins against the conference, including last year's Sugar Bowl win over a dispirited Georgia team.

Texas expected to win but instead trailed the entire game. To their credit, the Longhorns played tough and kept coming back, coming to within two points of LSU twice in the second half, but LSU held on and prevailed. And since the Longhorns were the ones to bring up conference comparisons, LSU's victory proved once again the SEC's superiority over the Big 12, despite claims of Tom Herman's mastery, and revealed how over-hyped teams from the State of Texas actually are.  The new rankings that came out today have LSU moved up to No. 4, just behind No. 3 Georgia, and Texas dropped down to No. 12.

And that was the day yesterday.  The two games tonight, Game 3 of the Red Sox-Yankees series and New England vs. Pittsburgh, are both on at the same time, so we anticipate some channel surfing but with a bias toward the more-intriguing Patriots' game.  

And then everything should go back to normal again.