Emergalv cheapass poetry Wednesday

Her eyes a-piercin’
and circled with blue
Crouch’d in the weeds a-waitin’
o’er the man she’d run through.

Her backbone of stern stuff,
her spear marred with gore,
Her skin look’d as rough
as the leathers she wore.

- Rennald d’Ricvall
From The Southerlands

Lecture!

La lecture! Il faut bien en parler, puisqu’elle fait partie intégrante de ma vie depuis que je suis tout jeune (eh oui cette époque a bel et bien existé).

Comme avec tout le reste, mes goûts sont très variés. À différentes époques, j’ai alterné J.D. Salinger (paix ait son âme), Tom Clancy, Weiss & Hickmans, J.K. Rowlings, J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Bernard Weber, William Gibson et G.R.R. Martens et une foule d’autres autheur(e)s, cette liste étant de toute évidence non-exhaustive.

Beaucoup d’excellents livres disparaissent de la circulation, écrasés sous le poids des ‘New-York Times best-sellers’ el-cheapo du mois (fuuuuuuuuuck). C’est dans les brocantes de livres et les friperies, quelques années après leur publication, qu’on trouve les perles rares, les récits oubliés, les vielles éditions (au couvertures souvent plus attrayantes que leurs ré-éditions plus récentes). Je refuse encore de m’acheter les nouveaux formats de Dune, quitte à patienter et me fier au pur hasard pour trouver de vielles éditions. Dans les années 70-80, on faisait avec les moyens du bord, mais on savait faire de la jolie reliure ;)

Certains romans me tombent entre les mains d’une manière totalement inatendue. Je me souviens à l’époque du CÉGEP d’avoir pioché Kindred Spirits (le premier et seul bon volume du Dragonlance Meetings Sextet) pour 69¢ dans un magasin de l’Armée du Salut à Brossard, le tout sur un coup de tête et parce que je n’avais rien à lire au moment de l’achat. Ce coup de tête s’est avéré un bon choix, qui m’a poussé à lire la série au complet par pure curiosité.

Je pourrais dire la même chose pour All Quiet on the Eastern Front (Erich Maria Remarque) et Jarhead (Anthony Swofford), dont j’avais vu les adaptations cinématographiques mais que je ne trouvais pas en étagère. J’ai trouvé les deux à 4.99$ dans un Village des Valeurs, tous deux en excellent état. Il va sans dire que j’ai dévoré les deux dans les semaines suivant mon achat.

C’est dans une brocante de livres nouvellement ouverte à Longueuil que je suis tombé à la fois sur Candideet Cyrano de Bergerac. Idem côté voracité littéraire: je me suis farci ces classiques en moins de temps qu'il suffirait à Cyrano de faire sa tirade du nez.

Quelques mois plus tard, comble de bonheur, je trouve par hasard l’ironiquement excellent Molvania : a land untouched by modern dentistry par Jetlag Travel Guides et ma première copie du The Zombie Survival Guide de Max Brooks. J’ignore quel genre de personne dérangée peut être amenée à se départir d’aussi bons livres, mais je saute sur l’aubaine anyways.

Etc, etc, etc...

À y penser, je dirais facilement que mes meilleures lectures ont été des découvertes impromptues, comme si les livres avaient choisi leur moment pour aparaître sur mon radar. Le fait même qu’elles soient des trouvailles totalement inattendues doit allumer une ampoule à l’intérieur de ma tête qui mèle l’opportunité à la curiosité.

À l’inverse, si j’achète un livre que je prévoyais déjà acheter depuis un bout de temps, ou si je le reçois en cadeau, il risque de se faire oublier dans un coin poussiéreux de ma bibliothèque pendant quelques temps alors que mes lectures dites ‘soudaines’ lui volent constamment la priorité. Étrange, non?

Alors comme avec les rencontres, c’est l’impromptu et le spontanné qui l’emporte.

Allez savoir…

Mercy

Hi everybody and welcome to another edition of The Quiet Alpha. It's been nearly two weeks since our last installment, and what a crazy two weeks they've been! But I'm going to share something today that is a bit out of the ordinary. This is the first in a series of semi-related short stories that will be posted to this blag as the weeks go by and I'm too lazy or distracted to come up with more up-to-date rants.

I present to you:

Mercy

Vohanna looked at the young man. He was sitting down with his back propped against the tree stump, only half-conscious. Bruised but otherwise unharmed, the youth had been taken down early in the fight. Milewe had made sure to drag any weapons away from him, with the exception of a single round shield, the use of which she would make clear to him soon enough.
The Saesar came up behind Milewe and kneeled beside her before the survivor. "Ask him if he knows why we spared him", she offered.
Milewe was about to begin translating when Mucha walked over, shock all but painted on her face. "You speak the language of these swine?", she spat out fiercely.
Vohanna shook her head sadly, rising to meet Mucha at eye level. "We weren't always at war, sora..."
If she still objected, this nevertheless seemed to placate her, or at least let her know there would be no further question of Vohanna’s authority. As she relented, Milewe turned gently to the young Nagled warrior and adressed him in his tongue.
“Mulak-mi anmmah a y?” she attempted, her accented rendering of the foreign tongue making her feel clumsy. Know you the reason why you were shown mercy?
The juvenile only stared at her, his face a mixture of revulsion, fear, and… total incomprehension. She repeated, more slowly, and this time, understanding registered on his features, though the look of hostility remained the same. It was to be expected
“Loa”, he said through clenched teeth. No
“Doesn’t understand, does he?” asked Vohanna, strenly, her hands busy with the cleaning of her spearhead. Judging by her ugly grin, Mucha seemed to relish the idea.
“No he doesn’t.”, confirmed Milewe, pausing to think of her next sentence. “Vi abu”, she motionned to the dead laying all around them. “Palla… a y goa malaat a en. Mulak?” Look around. You must return them to the earth, understand?
She waited. Again, no answer. “Mulak a la?” Do you understand me?
She poked him in the chest, hoping for a reaction, and pointed to the shield laying on the floor, making scooping moves with both hands. “A y goa malaat a en. Dig, damn you”
A single tear welled up in his eye and rolled down his aquiline nose. He lifted his arm to brush it away but the gesture died and his hand fell back to his thigh.
“Naam” he croaked, his skin taut against his cheekbones, defeat marking his every slight movement. Yes
“He gets it.”, said Milewe, finally. She nodded to him pitifully and got up. Vohanna handed her interpretor’s long bow back and gave the order to move out.
The trio left him to get a grip on himself, and dissapeared in the tall grasses where their sisters awaited them.

Billy Idol - Cyberpunk (1993)

I had nothing else to talk about today so I am going with one of my favourite pet peeves with the online community.


Bad press, good karma.

When you listen to Billy Idol's Cyberpunk, you're not really tapping into a musical genre per se: Rather, you are listening to history.

It was one of few commercial rock albums of its time to rely that much on digital means of production. As such, it was panned by more traditionnal rock media as being 'less than genuine', and you'd be hard-pressed to find a mainstream take on this piece that didn't explicitly imply a well-ingrained fear that digital audio workstations with software synths would one day replace instruments and programmers would replace musicians. Being early adopters of the technology working outside of the usual electronic music sphere, Idol and his entourage were pioneers.

Nowadays, when we lay the money down to go see a cyberpunk, postcyberpunk or cyberpunk-inspired work of fiction on the big screen, we can almost always, without question, expect to hear a soundtrack of either electronic, industrial or techno music. Well, it wasn't always this way. There was a time when you could feel 'cyberpunk enough' while listening to rock, dub, jazz, rap, classical music and just about anything that made you think. It was that blessed era that allowed for a variety of styles and the avoidance of an established cliché. It was during those times that, against all (if any) expectation, an already-sucessful, blonde british pop-rock artist decided he wanted to try something different. And try he did.

1993's Cyberpunk has a little something for everyone, granted you have a diverse taste in music. You'll hear straight rock, pop, psychadelic rock, electronica, techno, televised news stories recordings, quotes from movies, gospel and even the kind of new-age relaxation recordings you put on at night to convince yourself you're a perfectly sane human being (just keep telling yourself that, chombatta). This kind of progressive, all-inclusive music collage is a great sign of wide cultural awareness. Coming from a well-known radio-rock musician, this was quite a feat. (In fact, my only personnal gripe is the near-total absence of hip-hop influence, which was already well into crossing over with rock/metal in the early 90s. But, hey, you can only ask for so much.)

As far as concept albums go, Cyberpunk doesn’t as much tell a straigt beginning-to-end story as show you a different time in a different place. It’s an open window on a near-future urban world not too different to our own, just like the books, just like the movies.

It seems to me that, sometimes, reviewers have trouble understanding that an album is more often than not much more than the sum of its parts. In this case, they miss the mark entirely. Cyberpunk attracted a flurry of media attention, oftentimes curious but, sadly, most of it negative. On both sides of the fence, came voices crying foul. The most prominent, oft-cited reason for this is what both the media and internet community interpreted as an attempt to 'cash-in' on an 'emerging trend'. Far from being exclusive to cyberculture, this response is a typical knee-jerk reaction of any cultural group meeting the next generation of enthusiasts, combined with the fear of losing the privileged position as trendsetters. Less hostile, more welcoming members, of course, offered that he was genuinely interested in the themes and ideas of cyberculture and cyberdelic aesthetics. These more compromising voices, were however, drowned out by the naysayers.

If I may offer a little insight, Billy Idol was really on to something. He may have been criticized by both the cyberpunk and rock audiences for attempting to blindly associate himself with the name 'cyberpunk', but he in fact, knowingly or not, perhaps even naïvely, landed himself in the shoes of a Sprawl character wading through a sea of uncertain, possibly dangerous neon-glowing wonders both appealing and terrifying.

Classic cyberpunk fiction often portrays young, inexperienced individuals dabbling in technologies they hardly understand, but which captivates them and is readily available. This naïve fascination often leads to wild experimentation, unexpected accidents, radical changes of personnal lifestyles and the spontaneous birth of new sub cultures. These characters may not know much, initially, but they have the means, and they try their damnedest. This promethean gift to the 'modern primitives' of the cyberpunk world is what fuels most of its science-fiction and ensures the continuous melodrama of man and machine. Analogous to this young cybergeneration, Idol stumbled upon something he liked and could become greatly excited about, despite being tech-illiterate*. Thus, he immediately found himself in a role not unlike that of our young tech-amateurs described above. As a result he is branded as both a newbie and a sellout. Tragic indeed. But you don't get more 'cyberpunk' than being in that specifically uncomfortable position.

* Just a footnote, but does anyone remember the oft-cited anecdote how William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a Hermes 2000 typewriter? Yeah, I thought I'd mention it.

Musicians let different input sources inspire them. They are not documentary writers, nor are they news reporters or ivory-tower academics. They interpret concepts through their senses, first and foremost. What-you-hear-is-what-you-get.

The same reviewers often place too much emphasis on the business aspect of an artist's body of work. How well did it do? How did fans react? Did it attract a new fanbase? Did it pay for the next album? Did it open new opportunities for the artist? The fact of the matter remains that the album was a whim, an experiment, an envy, a 10-month labour of love, not a career move. No one twisted Mr. Idol's arm and said "well Billy, here's how you tap into this market". He asked around, got some gear setup, sat down with his bandmates and got informed on how to use it creatively.

The cyberpunk genre is characterized by cultural cross-pollinisation, with new subcultures birthed at the drop of a hat, and old, obsolete ideas rapidly replaced. With this mindset, everything is possible and more traditional conventions break down. How can anyone complain about a breach of rules that do not even exist?

Thus, Idol did not embrace a musical style: he embraced an approach.

Is it a good listen? That depends on your tastes. Is it inspired? Definitely. Does it sound like anything else that came out at that time? Nope. Was it genius? Perhaps even not, but it has its controversial place in the hazy spectrum of the 90s ProTools boom, and in cyberpunk history.

Shock the system, baby.

Thursday Gear Porn Extravaganza

Once in a while, I can't help but keel over and drool all over myself in awe of a piece of equipment which has caught my attention. Introducing the sleek, sexy and flexible MKH-800 TWIN. Hubba hubba.

A lot of mics work with selectable polarity patterns, which is an indispensable tool when you have a very specific tone/application in mind. You want to hear only one side of the room? Go cardioid (and place it accordingly, yo). You want to capture dialog for film, go up-close and personnal with your talent's mouth with a hyper-cardioid mic (you know you want to). You like a good room tone to harmonize your song mix? Omni and figure-8 are your friends. And if you're feeling kind of kinky, try a MS-style setup using a mix of figure-8 and directional. Anything goes, but you're usually limited by each microphone's available patterns (most will have one or two, maybe three). And what you capture going to tape is usually limited to what you decided to leave out when you picked your polar pattern. Anything short of omnidirectionnal will necessarily cut something out and leave you to work with it.

I've worked with the regular MKH 800 in-studio and let me tell you, it's one heck of a flat mic. Except for that alpha-plus-plus gentle peak starting at 6kHz, all frequencies are born equal when passing through the 800. End-result is moderately 'brighter', but that's actually a great asset when you're recording voiceover. Everything else is just crystal clear say-it-like-it-is, nearly-uncoloured audio.

And I mean... just look at this response curve... Yum :Þ



I'll fess up to my little Sennheiser fetish, but you have to admit this stuff is teh sex.

The thing with expensive high-end mics usually is that they tend to be highly specialized (ever use a Telefunken M12 on a bass drum? So what if it can handle the SPL? How about you save it for the overheads instead, kthxbye). At this kind of price tag, you'll want to have a few justifiable reasons to own each one. But the TWIN completely destroys that notion as it offers incredible flexibility.

Instead of featuring a built-in selector, the TWIN sends a stereo signal to your DAW, then you control it by simply muting, fading, panning, inverting the phase and whatnot. This means you can re-create polar patterns AFTER recording, and still keep your unmodified signal ready to use if you ever change your mind and want to go back without having to record again. It's almost like cheating, only not. This approach allows you to fake all the known patterns in the book and everything in between...

...and all that from a single high-quality RF condenser mic.

I'm sold.

This marks a change in mentalities, really: a move to the 'real' digital era with a lot more interaction between your gear and software. You have a shorter, stockier mic without switches or buttons on the body ( = better overall capsule insulation. Sure you can call me paranoid.) that works just perfectly if you know what to do it. And it's hella forgiving to use: when you have access to just about any tweak needed software-side, the only thing left to worry about is mic placement (don't get lazy on this).

Quick! Before you lose interest!

Cute, right? If only we were so forgiving of humans when they do the same :P

I’m ready to hork up the ugly truth and say it like it is: I’m lazy.

We all are, in a way: We shy away from effort, we don’t always volunteer for everything, we procrastinate, etc… And that’s fine. Only, sometimes, it can create some inner conflict if you're in denial about it. Let's be honest for a minute.

Laziness is not a problem if you don’t have any particular ambitions, but I happen to have a lot of interests. I mean a LOT. (The capital letters and italics should hint at just how much.) If I spend a long enough period time not pursuing any of my own goals, it’s probably because I’m busy helping others with theirs. The biggest problem is that block of time between these two modes.

When that 'block' happens, I switch to auto pilot and blindly go out of my way to begin new things or to foolishly say yes to everyone else… and that usually transforms a free schedule into a Calendar from Hell.

Le Calendrier Infernal means many things:

• Firstly, events you promise to attend will conflict with each other, or if they don’t, it’ll be the time spent moving from one place to the other that will run short.
  
• Secondly, you’ll slip in and out of focus as more and more things solicit your attention.
  
• Third..ly, you’ll forget things because you were so hyped about something else.
  
• Fourth…(-ly?) you’ll begin to hate your day job for stealing all your precious precious time, and resent having to sleep at night.
  
• Lastly, anything that was already on hiatus may rear its fugly hear and come bite you in the arse, begging for attention. You may even find yourself trying to find new things to do just to avoid your earlier engagements. And then you build a precedent for ‘creative procrastination’ which, while fascinating, might be a really bad habit.

So okay I’m lazy. I only feel really 'lazy' when I have a thousand things to do and I'm not doing them. But, but but… right before I had a thousand things to do, I wasn’t really lazy yet, was I? No! I was idle. And that’s far worse!

What makes me lazy? My interests.

Wait, what? The reason for Avian’s trouble in pursuing his interests are in fact the very same interests?

Ah, but it’s the truth. I have too many interests and not enough true passions (You know, the all-encompassing kind that could destroy your couple?). Some passing interests motivate me to work on new things, some others cause me to procrastinate and abandon them. Mainly though, other people’s projects (which I almost unerringly find interesting) interfere with my personnal things, and those personnal things draw me away from my promises to others. Oh the drama! Now I know what my computer feels like when I run over 9000 applications at once.

Managing your time is almost always a question of balancing what you want and what you need.

Whew…

But after all this, even when you succeed in getting everything done (or mostly everything done), even when you know other people appreciate you and what you can offer them, you still have to hang your ego on the rack and get things back into perspective.

Here’s my main man Fred Gallagher on humility and the willingness to improve yourself:

I would never call myself an artist. I'm not. 'Artist' is a gift word. I can't recall who the poet was (I believe it was Frost) who reacted to a student who called himself a 'Poet'. Frost reacted to this by saying you can't call yourself a poet, it's a gift word - it's something that other people have to bestow upon you. The same goes for artist. And even if people say that you are an artist, you have to be at a point that you are willing to accept that term. Me? I'm not quite there yet.

So slap that moniker on someone all you want, a person has got to feel worthy of the praise he/she receives before feeling it.

Funny how some of my art teachers (thankfully not all) back in college totally disagreed with this. They offered instead that artists were born, not made, and that technical skill was only an accessory to the ‘real thing’ (which you obviously can’t develop on your own, right?). Also according to them, thinking critically about art was just another way of acquiring ‘technique’. When you put it this way, Art itself (capital A, yeah) begins to sound like this untouchable divinity. That’s dangerous. It means you can't explore it without thinking you aren't qualified to do so. It means you can’t make any progress without feeling like a hack who could never hope to rival The Greats.

Sorry to disagree, but I don’t compete with the past. I compete with me.

Speaking of the past, the ancient greeks had a word: “techne”, which they used to describe both the art and craftsmanship. To me, they are nearly indistinguishable. If you do something well enough to get hired for it or innovative enough to influence the generations to come: it’s Art. If you push the envelope, develop new techniques or if you create new concepts: it’s Art. Nuff said.

Ian McConville has dealt with similar frustrations during his college days. I can empathize.

His own teachers postulated that ideas were more important than technique. That vision lends itself well to the field of art history. It’s also useful if you’re aiming to become an art critic. But when you want to be the creator, it’s counterproductive to think in these terms. It undermines your progression because it contradicts the age-old ‘practice makes perfect’ maxim.

Art is a convoluted process, and things are never that clear-cut when you get down to it. In this whole debate, the truth is probably somewhere in between the different worldviews, but a fellow’s entitled to his opinionated opinions, right?.

Avian out.

And now for something completely different... NOT!

"One of these days I might be tempted to ressurect Sato just for the fun of drawing her"

- Me, yesterday

Look at me being all eager and stuff :P

Some things just can't leave you. I've been trying to shake off the manga influence from my drawings for some years now, but I think it's just stuck with me for so long that it's going to stay forever unless I get post-hypnotic suggestion to the contrary. Regardless of what I try to do, all my characters are going to have huge heads and eyes hehe...

Wish the pose was more dynamic. Satoshi doesn't look like she's going to throw that basketball at all, just going to hold onto it for an hour or two.

And the hands, my god the hands. I think I'm going to set my house on fire right now, thanks.