DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Kenny Ausubel of AlterNet predicted the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election 13 months in advance:

This Is Your Brain on Public Relations

Part of the problem is that human beings seem to be hardwired for fraud.

George Lakoff, an author and professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who calls himself a “cognitive activist,” says this: “One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors — conceptual structures. The frames are in the synapses of our brains — physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.”

In other words, forget winning on the facts or the science. It’s all about the story. And once stories take hold, they’re hard to dislodge.

The article is about greenscamming. That’s a word I have yet to hear in the mainstream media. But it’s like the Matrix; it is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television… Or, to put it another way, “You think that’s Clean Air you’re breathing?”

Survey after survey shows that Americans care deeply about the environment and are even willing to shell out money to take good care of it. So duping innocent people into harming the environment requires an occult technology of trickery.

The head sorcerer hired by the GOP to provide guidance on fooling voters into doing something they don’t want to do is a guy named Frank Luntz. I’d gloat that Luntz’ report leaked to the press, except that it didn’t matter. In the terms of cognitive science, it was an apparently inconvenient fact.

But if you’re interested, read a summary at the AlterNet article (above) or the whole report at the LCV’s Bush Administration Rollbacks site.

Journalist Bill Moyers recently received the Global Environment Citizen Award from Harvard Medical School. His acceptance speech is devastating. I couldn’t read it straight through; my dinner started to back up on me.

Bill Moyers on Health and the Global Environment

Moyers was establishing a connection between religious fundamentalism and the destruction of the environment. It seems counter-intuitive that someone claiming respect and awe for all God’s creation would willingly participate in the systematic trashing of same. But that’s Moyer’s case, and he delivers.

James Watt, President Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior … told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

I’m strugging to accept that nutjobs like that can achieve high office. George W. Bush, I’m looking at you.

A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks… you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist [magazine] puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same god who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?”

Here’s the ultimate irony: the United States was founded by people who left their home country to escape religious persecution. Now I’m considering leaving the United States for the same damn reason.

I have no words.

(Day 1 is back here)

Tuesday morning I was cleaning up the session files, removing some of the track plaque in preparation for making my final backup and rough mix. I’ll repeat that: deleting files before making a backup. Can you see where this story is going? I’ll cut to the cut: instead of erasing two aborted overdub attempts, I speed-clicked through too many confirmation dialogs and wiped out the kick drum track for two verses, a chorus, and the big drum fill I’d spent hours recording the night before.

And then I panicked. I felt a wave of full-body anxiety that caused me to jump out of my seat and wrench my Etymotic earphones out of my ears so violently that the plastic earbud of one of them stayed behind, wedged in my ear canal like a cork. This was the extreme low point in the recording process, a disaster entirely born of my own haste and mindlessness: not like getting into a minor car wreck, but like getting into a minor car wreck in a friend’s 700-series because you’re trying to beat a new Corvette off the line. Not like a bad haircut, but like a bad haircut on your wedding day from the cousin in cosmetology school. Not like dropping dinner on the floor, but like dropping the baby on the floor. Well, maybe not that bad, but still.

I’d seen it coming, existentially speaking. Andrew had suffered a system crash that wiped out tons of data. Steve had come down with a headcold that threatened his ability to sing. It was simply my turn. Bad things come in threes, they say: I was born, I grew up, and you know the rest.

After remembering to breathe, and having my wife extract the remaining piece of my headphones from my skull, I looked into un-delete software for OS X. There is only one such product, and it failed. I was a bitter, bitter man.

I checked my backups and was much relieved to discover that I did have backups for the verses and chorus. I regained a modicum of perspective: OK, so I’d have to retrack the previous evening’s overdubs. That’s a loss, but not a terrible one.

I restored the deleted tracks and played back the result. “Why does the snare drum on these tracks sound so different?” I thought. I had heard the difference before; all the song sections recorded in the B set of inputs had a different snare sound. Realization hit me like a raw fish to the forehead: I had no overhead mics in the B set of inputs; instead, I’d recorded a duplicate of the stereo toms track. The snare sounded different because 75% of the snare sound comes from the overheads, which I hadn’t recorded because I hadn’t double-checked my input assignments. So much for my backups.

Re-tracking all the affected sections only took an hour. My adrenals were working overtime. And finally I re-recorded the overdubs, achieving not perfection but something close enough for rock and roll.

Ode to Soup (final drums, final bass, scratch dulcimer, no guitar, rough mix with some compression and EQ) (Copyright © 2004 matthew mcglynn)

And then I stayed up half the night tearing down the drumkit, packing away acoustic foam, and stowing cage parts in the garage, assisted throughout by my outrageously patient, incredibly supportive, and hugely pregnant wife. Steve (he’s the guitarist, not the baby) would arrive in 18 hours.

With only four days to go before my bandmates were to show up, I knew I’d have to change my plans somewhat in order to finish the drum track for the final song, Ode to Soup. It’s a longish and somewhat complex song, because I wrote it and that’s the way music is supposed to be, as far as I know anyway.

The previous long/complex song I’d tracked (Groove95) took me eight days. I recorded it within a day, but I needed a week of rehearsals to get to that point. I didn’t have the same luxury here.

I did have a map of the song, though; last Spring I’d composed the drum track and recorded it using an electric drum kit on loan from a friend. I wanted the final recorded version of the song to feature my acoustic drums, because the electric kit hadn’t worked very well for some grooves. Two examples: ghost notes were buried in the mix, and the 16th-note hi-hat pattern during the solo section sounded like machine gun fire.

That electric-kit track was recorded in sections, as I composed them. The version of the song released here previously was assembled from the resulting parts. The assembly process was ultimately successful, but had left a bad impression on me because each edit took 10 or 20 minutes and some frustration when the joins weren’t clean — for example, when the tail of one section and the start of the next both hammered the downbeat but on different cymbals, or worse, when these downbeats were even a sixty-fourth note apart in time. During editing, it seemed it would have been a lot faster to just play the song straight through in one pass, and my takeaway lesson at the time was “it will be a lot faster to just play the song straight through in one pass.” Which is of course why recording Groove95 took me eight days.

But I had no alternatives, so I created two complete sets of input tracks in ProTools with the intention of alternating between the sets: record the first verse in set A, the second in set B, the first chorus in set A, etc. Each set had seven tracks: kick, snare, hats, stereo toms, stereo overheads. I skipped the room mic for this tune because I didn’t want to have to stitch together yet-another stream of audio.

The recording process was quick. Each section is less than 90 seconds long. It just doesn’t take very long to record 90 seconds’ worth of music. Within a couple hours I had relearned, rehearsed, and tracked the entire song, minus two drum fills that I could overdub. That was Sunday afternoon.

Monday night I overdubbed the two fills. I was so close to completing the entire five-song process that I was almost not totally stressing out. Did I mention that my wife is 38 weeks pregnant? I have been fighting a million years’ worth of nesting instinct here, turning the nursery into a recording studio for the last six weeks of my wife’s first pregnancy. I could taste my own stress, and it tasted just like your armpits after a job interview. Yeah, the one where you choked.

So it took two hours and about 30 takes to nail those fills. That sounds ridiculous, but they’re complex and I needed them to be perfect. To that end, I used ProTools to zoom in to view the waveform at about high magnification so I could see the spacing of the notes. I could see when the fill went slightly out of time, or when a velocity anomaly would cause a volume spike. Finally, the fills were perfect, and I was done.

Or so I thought…