DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The park service will send you a list of area lodging, if you ask. We called the few places nearest the park, thinking we’d rather stay close to avoid long daily commute into the park.

The problem is, the place we picked is a dump. You wouldn’t know that from its website, because the owners don’t publish pictures of the “chalets.” Maybe that should have been a clue.

When we arrived, the innkeeper was friendly. She gave us our pick of the seven cabins. I think they were all empty. They stood in a row, lined up along a gravel driveway like so many sacks of garbage waiting for the morning pickup.

The worst thing wasn’t the decor. I’m somewhat used to the 1970s-era shag carpet and dark paneling typical of lodges near national parks. I’ve stayed in a number of dim, depressing cabins; in fact, I’ve stayed in one, in particular, twice in four years, and I’m certain the carpet hadn’t been cleaned in the interim. So I wouldn’t say I have rarefied tastes or complicated requirements, except maybe at dinnertime.

But this place was a couple lumens short of “dim,” a couple symptoms beyond “depressing.” I can describe it in a word, one not normally associated with any place you’d be likely to sleep comfortably for a night, or even pass through without a shudder. The word is “infested.”

Maybe it was only the front porch, which was screened in. Most people use screens to keep bugs out. Here in the mountains, they do things a little differently.

In fact the cabin itself was nice enough, certainly no worse than I expected, although not nearly as nice as I’d hoped considering I’d just spent $150/night on it. But to even get into the cabin, one has to run a veritable gauntlet: the fly farm on the porch.

The door was standing open. (It was a sort of Maginot Line of a screened porch.) Inside, a thousand flies were beating themselves to death against the inside of the screened windows. A pile of fly carcasses had accumulated next to the cabin’s front door. They crunched underfoot.

For color, a few hornets hovered around the ceiling.

I imagined running through this space with my eyes and mouth closed, three to four times a day for the next two days. Worse, I imagined carrying Raphael through there. And I began to wonder if my Visa card’s travel insurance, along with its lost-luggage and cancelled-flight provisions, also has an allowance for “extermination.”

The thing was, we could have booked rooms at the lodge five miles down the road. It looked nicer when we drove by. But how would we manage the innkeeper here at the Maggot Ranch, who at that very minute was waiting for us to tell her which cabin we wanted?

I ran through a few likely scenarios in my mind. None ended well. But we had to do something, so I dredged up my kindest, least confrontational demeanor, and with what I hoped was an apologetic air I suggested to the woman that “we were hoping for something a little more upscale.”

She laughed at me. “‘Upscale?!’ Not around here,” she chortled. She offered me a refund and began the paperwork to undo my reservation. I hesitated to produce my credit card. “But we may be coming back;” I offered, “can’t we just let this be for a half hour while I go look at the other lodge?”

Her answer was direct: “If you don’t like it now, you won’t like it in 30 minutes. You won’t be happy, and I won’t be happy.” I realized I’d insulted her — not my intention, but perhaps not avoidable.

The conversation went on for two or three minutes, as I tried various approaches to a less-final solution. For me, the worst-case scenario wasn’t this lodge, but rather the very real possibility of having to stay in a motel an hour up the road at the interstate.

At one point the woman asked specifically what it was that had bothered us about her property. My facade cracked; for a moment I assumed anyone would be grossed out by having to walk through a cloud of flies to get into one’s home. But I’d underestimated this innkeeper, or should I say “flykeeper;” she laughed at me a second time.

“This is the wilderness!” she exclaimed. “We get all kinds of critters here.” Critters? Flies are critters? “We get coyotes, we get raccoons, we get bears,” she began, reciting a litany of other animal types I’d better not be afraid of now that I’d come into her wilderness, “we get chipmunks, we get snakes, we get — “

“Look, I had a couple foxes run through my back yard yesterday,” I interrupted her, “but I don’t exactly let them into the house to vomit on my pillow while I sleep.” Well, I didn’t really say that, or even think it, really. But it would have been good.

Anyway, her resolve firmed. “Don’t come back” were her final words. Hard to argue with that, especially considering that it was delivered with the proverbial look that could abruptly end life upon receipt. “Hey, nice face,” I didn’t say, “go point that thing at the front porch of Chalet 1 and you’ll save yourself a fortune in No-Pest Strips.”

We found rooms down the road at the Mineral Lodge. They were not quite as “wilderness,” but they were clean and — imagine! — the front porch didn’t look like the tent in those old OFF! commercials.

The new book is out. Do your local democracy a favor and buy a copy today. It’s sure to induce fits of stammering and denials from anyone who’s still a fan of the Bush Regime.

Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, told me last Fall that the project’s bandwidth fees skyrocket this time of year, as the world tunes into the website for the annual book release. So, although you can read the book online, ~$19 would go a long way toward ensuring the project’s success.

Here’s just one of the eye-opening stories you didn’t read about in the mainstream press: The US is spending more money in Iraq than on securing the homeland. National security spending has risen just 4% since September 11, 2001. “There are many [U.S.] chemical plants that have no fencing requirements, cameras, and no guards.” We have a “department of Homeland Security,” but whose homeland is getting secured? Hint: I won’t tell you its name, but its initials are not U, S, or A.

So I find this huge long gray hair on my hairbrush today, and I swear, my first thought is Who the hell borrowed my brush?

The other project for the weekend was to clean out some of the accumulated junk in the garage. There were a number of cardboard boxes needing attention, as usual, but also a couple old stalled recycling projects to finish off.

Stuffed in one corner was my used-media box:

• 80 CDs and DVDs, either bad burns or obsoleted backups, plus a few old applications
• 37 floppy disks
• a half-dozen 5-1/4 inch floppies, which I guess contained fader-automation settings for the JAR record, because each floppy had a song name on it. They haven’t been touched since 1995 and I have no idea what sort of machine might read them.
• a handful of inkjet cartridges
• a couple toner cartridges

The whole mess went off to GreenDisk. I need to find a local solution, though; UPS hit me for nearly $20 this time. Shipping 15 lbs. of tech trash to Missouri isn’t cheap.

Stuffed in another corner was a box of old shoes. I started collecting them in 2002 when I learned that Nike recycles shoes. I figured most people have a couple of pairs in the back of the closet that are headed either to Goodwill or the landfill. I solicited donations and ended up with about 20 lbs worth. The ones with some life left in them went to charity; the rest just left here for Wilsonville, destined to become a name-brand waste product.

It causes me no small amount of angst that the vast majority of Americans, children of multiple decades of our disposable culture, continue to flood their local landfills with papers, plastics, batteries (and other household toxics), shoes, media, re-usable packing material, etc. So, despite my appreciation for having just reclaimed several cubic feet of storage space, and the karmic relief of crossing a few long-latent projects off the big list, I’m sure I’ll start collecting recyclables again soon.

Last year I christened my drum tracking room “Borrowed Time Studios,” an ironic comment on the fact that as soon as Raphael needed his own bedroom, or we had houseguests, I’d have to tear it down. The fact that I’ve postponed this journal entry until after having spent 12 hours carefully documenting every EQ and compressor setting, photographing every mic choice and position, stacking and wrapping acoustic foam, winding cables, latching cases, and stowing a room’s worth of studio gear in other rooms around the house makes the name all the more poignant.

So ends another summer’s recording session. I tracked six songs, which will find their way onto three CDs by two artists… not bad for a summer’s work (despite the nagging voice that says I should have done more).

Here was the view from the more fun of my two offices this summer:

See more pictures in the new Debris.com Gallery.

The acoustic foam was haphazardly placed, but it worked out fine. As before, the main rule was to avoid scarring the walls. I velcroed most of it to the ceiling, and duct taped more to the windows.

The big piece of soundboard on the left side of the room was a new invention for this session. It covers a small alcove and the room’s doorway. It reduced bleed into the house (aside from the concussion of kick drum that travelled straight through the walls and ceiling) and removed a troublesome source of reflections.

I opted against miking the toms for this session. None of the songs I recorded really called for heavy fills (well, one exception), and I wanted to try recording the room in stereo. The feedback I get from the various mixing engineers will inform my decision next time… or, I’ll just buy that Onyx 800R I’ve been lusting for, and do away with this silly 8-track limitation. (Why not record 13 tracks of drums? What else are you going to use all those inputs for… vocals?)

Snare mics: M422 on top, Audix D-1 underneath. Both tracks were compressed through an RNC, about 3:1, and recorded separately, to give the mix engineer lots of options for snare sounds.

Kick mics: D-112 inside, M380 outside. These two tracks were compressed through a second RNC, about 7:1, then mixed to mono.

The hi-hat mic was an ATM-31, an old condenser that sounded much better in my rough mixes than I expected. Some recording engineers figure the overheads will capture enough hat sound, but I like to put a dedicated mic on it for the offbeat chirp sounds that might otherwise get lost in the mix.

The overheads you know about.

Room mics were EV-635a’s. They lack high-end response, which works out fine for an ambient application.

The snare is a cheap old Tama steel-shell drum. I haven’t recorded it in years, but I got it sounding good for a remake of an old Police tune, the first song I tracked this summer, and then I didn’t want to take the time to dial in my “better” drum. I tuned it high and tight, Copeland style, and I think I got a pretty good crack out of it. In fact, listening to one of my rough mixes from this session, I think it sounds great, and I am certifiably lousy at mixing. So there you go.

One of the great truths of recording is that it’s impossible to finish a session without making a shopping list for next time:

• Another Oktava MK-012 for the hi-hat. I’ll try the hypercardioid cap in hopes of limiting snare bleed.
• A large-diaphragm condenser. I haven’t researched these yet, but I’m eager to try one on the dulcimer.
• An FMR RNP would go really nicely with that large-diaphragm condenser.
• As noted above: Mackie’s Onyx 800R. It would give me a pile of additional inputs and a digital output. Oh yes. Hmm, Ebay is open 24 hours…