Arrivals

A little more than three weeks ago, I wrote about a piano I once had on another of my blogs.  And here it is:

I wrote the earlier post on the day I learned that it might be coming to me, but I didn't want to say so as there wasn't any certainty.  Last week, however, upon acquiring the piano from her grandmother, my daughter assured me that she'd be storing it in my house, so once again this old familiar piano is back in my possession.  It's been 27 years.

Took five professional movers to get this beast moved out from its former residence into this one, which tells me how strong my friends and I were.  I suggested to the movers that I could disassemble it to some degree and they agreed ... but after such a long time, looking at the underside, I've forgotten how it comes apart.  And I don't have Michelle any more to tell me how.  Cost me a pretty penny to have it placed; I had to raise the picture in the upper right about 10 inches; the mirror on the left was fine.

The piano's width is 62 inches across the top; it's 51 inches high.  So glad that my in-laws could seize it back then, since they took such rotten care of it; in fact, it's been sitting ignored in a basement for more than 15 years, without one ounce of care.  There are chunks and bits taken out of it, there are knobs missing, though its only moderately dusty inside.  I'm surprised that it isn't more out of tune.  Going to cost me more money to have it tuned and I suppose that beyond what care I can give it myself, getting it restored is another step along the way.

I'm told it has no resale value.  Present-day musicians aren't interested in it, according to those musicians I know, while having a piano in the home hasn't the verve it did once.  The piano movers were astounded; they'd never moved a piano this heavy, nor this old, in all their experience.  As I'd said, it's more than 160 years old and it's made of real rosewood — which no piano is, nowadays, and as such they're cheap replicas that weigh much less.  The movers felt they'd earned their pay today.

But, I'm told, I'd be lucky to get a $1,000 for it if I sold it.  Which I find remarkable.  My daughter has been talking to a piano restoration company this last week and they assure her that yet, they can bring it back to its original colour ... and that's going to cost more than supposedly the piano will sell for.  If this is true, then how does the restoration company stay in business?  I think — and my daughter agrees with me — that in general, where it comes identifying the value of things, people don't know jack.

Anyway, there's no plan to sell it.  And here is the bad news.  I'm quitting D&D.  I'm going to learn how to play piano so I can become the world's oldest concert pianist.  This D&D has been a nice run, but it's all done now.  Wish me luck.

Music Library

This post has nothing whatsoever to do with D&D.  It's about popular music, and how my relationship to music has evolved over the last thirty some years.  And it's about how music fits into my creative process, which may be of value to someone.

Coming of age in the 1970s, my first conscious memory of a popular song came in the summer of 1973.  I connect the song with standing in the sun on the flooring of cabin my father built himself, from scratch; the previous summer, the raised deck had been built and in 1973, the walls were going up.  The radio played all day when he worked, and a funny song that played twice a day was very popular here in Canada, though it only reached #9 in America.  The memorable lyric went, "... long haired hippy type pinko fags ..." which is an odd lyric for a 9-y.o., as I was; but of course, living in the television and brick-phone era, I had no idea what the last word meant.

It would be years and years before I would identify what the song was, or who sang it.  No one ever seemed to remember it; and no radio station ever played it, perhaps because the lyrics grew increasingly obtuse in a post 1975 world.

Thoughout my teens and 20s, as I worked on D&D, university or anything, really, radio music was always an important part of my ethic.  Until reaching my mid-40s, I found it difficult to work in a silent room, though I do not when I'm writing something new, such as this blog post.  But when I'm working on the wiki, or maps, or researching, or copyreading, or crunching numbers, music plays pretty much constantly.  The most valuable aspect of music, for me, is that it's ongoing.  As each song picks up from the last, it evokes a steady sound that appeals to my sense of creative flow.  When I'm deeply engaged, I don't hear the music at all; and when I'm more relaxed, I hear something I like and begin to sing along.  Most of all, because there are no interruptions in the sound, I don't have to interrupt my thoughts to find something new.

I started collecting music around 1977.  Obviously, there were albums, and my parents had many from the 1950s and 60s, but I had only a few.  Mostly, I worked with 8-track tapes.  We had a player, and 8-tracks let me copy music without ambient noise ... though of course the quality wasn't great and it degraded over time.  Still, at 88 minutes a tape, I slowly accumulated some 20 tapes of individual songs, about 1760 minutes.

With the 1980s, I moved onto VHS recordings of music videos and cassette tapes, which would play in my, yes you guessed it, walk-man.  I bought albums on casette and accumulated about 4,000 minutes of individual songs, much of it downloaded from public library resources.  The height of my cassette library came around 1999, when I would play mixed tapes (illegally) for the coffee shop I ran, astounding a lot of my older-than-40 patrons with music they hadn't heard in decades.  See, my tastes in music are very eclectic.

In 1999, I was given the volume shown by a friend at the time, who knew about my pursuit of music.  I couldn't find a copy of this specific edition online (though there are other editions), so its my own photo.  The book is very beat up; the spine is broken, and yes that is duct tape along the binding.  I've been carrying the book around for more than 20 years now, using it as a source for finding music, learning more about music and ... well, I'll explain.

The book includes every song that ever made Billboard's Top 40 between January 1st, 1955 and December 24th, 1988 ... even if the song made it for just one week.  The number of pages runs 444, organised by performer.

Coincidentally, the book arrived in my possession somewhere around August of '99, when in October of that year I took a room in a house occupied by three others; one of those was a hard-core computer techie, who built his own computers for fun ... and that is how I came to be introduced to Napster.

I'm sure everyone knows, but Napster was the first media sharing platform that would allow individuals to download music without playing for it.  You know, piracy.  When I started using the program, songs being uploaded consisted of a dozen individual files, which had to be stored in separate folders; thankfully, that was soon overcome.  

As I was working as a cook in the evening, and most everyone else worked during the day, I had the run of my roommate's computer and napster for about 4 hours a day.  And during those four hours, I conceived of a gargantuan task.  Let me show you by posting the pages 112-113 from the Billboard volume above:

This gives a sense of the book's layout.  As I say, there are 444 pages of the kind of content shown above.  Intentionally, these pages include the song that I mentioned at the post's start: it's Uneasy Rider, by the Charlie Daniel's Band.

The rubbed out marks are a legacy from those Napster days, when I decided that I'd listen to every song from the book, and decide afterwards if it was a song I wanted to keep.  As might be expected, the task itself took longer than Napster survived as a platform, so the work continued steadily throughout the 2000s, right into the time when this blog was started.  Slowly, I accumulated a total of 1,200 songs, which mixed in with another 700 from the time since 1988.  That's about 6,500 minutes.  It takes about a month to run through my library, if I'm working full time and I'm able to listen to music while working.  Which is mostly anywhere I've worked.

I haven't listened to a radio for any meaningful period since 2006.  And since 2017, my general interest in reviewing music online that's just come out has faded.  But the last decade of listening to my own music, and to my partner's music as well, has awakened me in ways I never expected.

First, I could tell that what I had wasn't enough.  It was lots, and I wasn't getting tired of it, but the eclecticism offered didn't satisfy.

Secondly, the overall list failed to reproduce what radio used to offer.  Most of what I'd here in the era of radio was stuff that wasn't particularly special to me ... and though I didn't realise it at the time, that lack of specialness tended to highlight the content that was special.  The good stuff stood out better because it wasn't all good stuff.

And so, during Covid, I began an experiment.  I decided to obtain every song that had reached a top ten position, regardless of my personal feelings about the group or their music.  I'd ignore my "taste."  I'd treat it as though taste didn't matter.  I began the process in February 2021, doing as much as I felt like doing, at the speed I felt like working at.  At the same time, I'd obtain anything else that looked moderately interesting, as I went along.

I noticed the effect right away, as the first few hundred songs were mixed into my rotation.  And as that number grew and grew, I found myself feeling better about how the background music was influencing my attention.  At first, there were songs that definitely sounded like nails on a blackboard (and you'll notice that I've been deliberate about not explaining my general taste in music) ... but I forced myself to ignore that, and let the familiarity of those songs sink into my consciousness.

I may be very different from the rest of the world, but I'm increasingly learning that the difference between a "good" song and a "bad" song is how familiar I am with it.  There are numerous songs in my list now that I'd have considered "bad" in 2021; but which now, two years later, I'm quite indifferent to.  Some I've completely changed about.  It's somewhat interesting.

I'm writing this post because the book is very nearly complete.  I'm just 12 pages from the end (at the band "War"), which I should have wrapped up some time after the weekend.  My list is now 4,700 songs (more than 15,000 minutes), and I have my work cut out for me going forward.

Billboard magazine has finally seen the light and has chosen to admit the internet exists ... and so in the last two years, they've made their week-by-week top 100 song lists available.  I'm starting to create documents that organise these lists so that when I'm ready to move on, through 1989 and into the '90s, I can go on collecting anything that's reached the top 10.  I don't see any reason not to continue that pursuit up to the present day, though I do tend to think modern music is a somewhat, shall we say, derivative.  But what does that matter?  I don't have to like it.

Nor is that the end.  I've been considering that the "top 10" may be a bit limiting.  Why not the top 20?  That's good for at least another hundred songs per year.  I'm quite curious about what a music library of 20,000 songs would be like ...

To work to, that is.  A list so large that it never bores me, no matter how long I leave it on.

Bully Boy

I do not generally post ripped material, but since it is impossible to find this song in any format but this one, I'll go ahead and take the consequences.  If the estate of the McGarrigle sisters wants to come after me, I will tell them firmly that they should make their album available in digital.  This is from 1964, the year of my birth:




She’s sailing out of Lunenburg harbour,
A legend and a win before her,
She won all the races of her day.
The ghost we see is only time away,
And it’s blow boys, blow my bully boys, blow . . .

Captain Angus Walters met the Prince of Wales;
He rode the seas and fought the gales.
They sold his ship to carry freight;
The queen sailed off to meet her fate,
And it’s blow boys, blow my bully boys, blow . . .

Now in the memory of other times
She rides as the tail on the back of a dime;
She follows the wind then answers the call,
As seagulls cry to the sea and all,
And it’s blow boys, blow my bully boys, blow . . .

The Lack of Women's Voices

"Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or money to do it right."

Kurt Herbert Adler

I feel like I can breathe.

After a week of going from work to work, from the restaurant to the computer and back to the restaurant, I feel for the first time this morning that I can catch my breath.  I work tonight, which is a pity, but at least for a few hours my time is my own.  And of course what I want to do with that time is write.

More than a week ago I posted a song without comment - and it received no comment, which isn't much of a surprise.  There's no real way to talk about music; we feel music, and how it strikes us, motivates us, inspires us or sustains us, those things are almost impossible to articulate.

These last three years of putting together projects for publication have been instructive as to how I function as an artist.  After a certain point, as I near each deadline, the effort and the stress begins to overwhelm me and I begin to reach for crutches - anything that will help me limp across the finishing line.

I'm not sure I mentioned it at the time, back in 2014 . . . but when I was making myself get up and face How to Run each day, struggling to get it right and terrified of getting it wrong, as I knew how harsh the gaming community can be, the song that got me through that dark time was Sara Bareilles' Brave.  For, as I try to explain, writing is an act of courage:

"You can be the outcast or be the backlash of somebody's lack of love - or you can start speaking up."

I'm going to talk about music a bit.  I find it very strange what the fellows at the restaurant listen to for music.  Whereas back in the 90s, when I worked all the time in kitchens, the music was all radio.  Now, of course, it is a speaker and a competition for whose Ipod will be connected to it.

I work with three kinds of guys, regarding their music - and let me just make it clear that I like these guys, whatever their motivations or their proclivities.  They're not especially bright, none of them are educated or even imagine they will be educated, but they're brutally honest and up front about how they feel about things.  This is what I've always liked about cooks; there's none of the dissembling, passive-aggressive shit that turns up in office work.  These guys are straight up aggressive.

First, there are 18-22 year old white kids, all Canadians, fresh out of high school, complete with pimples and baby fat.  Every one of them, without exception, listens to black male hip-hop, exclusively.  They don't listen to music from white men (with the exception of Eminem's Slim Shady period - that earlier stuff, never) and they absolutely do not listen to any music with a woman's voice.

The second group are mixed-race Canadians, mostly white, in their mid-20s and early 30s.  They don't mind the hip-hop but when they play their music it is all 1970s progressive rock or - believe it or not - disco.  There's no early 80s new wave, no U2, no Def Leppard, no Guns & Roses, no metal and absolutely no grunge whatsoever.  It is like the music invented between 1980 and the present never existed.  To the negatives we can add in no punk - not even the light punk like Talking Heads.  For 70s stuff, there's no Clash, no Boston, no Supertramp, none of the bands that invented the formula that U2 or Guns & Roses capitalized on.  Oh, and no Bowie.  There's a little Pink Floyd, lots of Led Zepplin (of course), a little Anthem and then after that it is mixed pop-rock like the Eagles and Jethro Tull.  Finally, they absolutely do not listen to any music with a woman's voice.

The third group are all guys from overseas: Kenya, Sudan, India and Central America.  These guys just don't care.  They don't play their music - but I suspect it would be World Music if anyone gave them the chance.

This thing about women singers has always been there.  Back in the 90s, when kitchens I lived in listened to Grunge day and night, with the occasional old-school rap, the ratio would have been 9:1 male to female vocalists.  Now it is none.  I swear.  I have been paying attention and in four weeks of working in this kitchen, with about a dozen different pods attached to the speaker, no one plays anything with a woman.

It tells me that white boys have lost their voice entirely in the world of music.  They've embraced a music from another time, a music that my own generation grew up with and rejected as they reached for something more personal and - dare I say it - sexual in content than the repeated propping up of the male ego to which bands like the Sex Pistols or AC/DC desperately clung.  I was 16 when disco died, when for a year we went to the Death of Disco parties, rushing to the raunchy lyrics of the Cars, Blondie and Bowie.  Progressive rock by then had become so over-processed we couldn't bear that shit any more - but of course by the mid-80s everything became so over-processed that rap was inevitable.  So it goes.

Those white boys who can't relate to music that was old when their fathers were children are immersed in the music of black boys, like some weird parody of that scene at the beginning of Office Space when the white boy in his car, listening to rap, carefully turns it down when the scary black men walk by.

It's impossible to see the lack of women's voices in their lives as an 'option.'  It's fear, pure and simple.  As their lives are becoming more puritanical, between the hysteria of the feminist community and the toxic backlash of endless male pundits endlessly deconstructing every single thing wrong with women, ever, to hundreds of thousands of listeners, males are retreating.  Whereas once these aggressive males I work with would have peppered their steady discourse (cooks never stop talking) with sexual jokes, innuendo, flirting (there are attractive servers right there) and ever-present homosexual accusations, said in jest or not, now the dialogue is all drugs, all the time.  I need to get drugs, I need to do drugs, I've just done drugs, these drugs are better than those drugs, etcetera and etcetera.  Drugs are safe, drugs are a retreat, drugs do not include recriminations and risk, drugs help.  Women are scary and difficult to predict and it's probably just better - since we're all still young, dumb and full of cum - that we silence those voices.  And since the front house servers are all trying to get on the good side with the cooks, they do their best to act like one of the boys or they don't talk to the kitchen at all.

That is a pattern I've noticed at the other kitchens I've worked in the past ten months.  The division between front house and back house is more pronounced than ever - in part because of corporate-restaurant policy but I think it is also that there's less trust between the two sides.  There are always male front-house servers, of course, but they tend to either be bartenders (in which case they have the same characteristics as the cook, just better groomed and less morlock like) or they're a bit gay and they tend to side with the girls.

Anyway, I just quoted a woman singer as the sustainer of my soul, so it's obvious I'm nothing like these guys.  I live in a world - evident from my latest podcast - that has loud women's voices in it.  I do my best to pretend, however.

Days

There's a rhythm in rush these days,
Where the lights don't move and the colors don't fade
Leaves you empty with nothing but dreams
In a world gone shallow in a world gone lean;
Sometimes there's things a man cannot know
Gears won't turn and the leaves won't grow
There's no place to run and no gasoline
Engines won't turn and the train won't leave.

I will stay with you tonight
Hold you close 'til the morning light
In the morning watch a new day rise
We'll do whatever just to stay alive.

Jose Gonzalez - Stay Alive

Improvisation

Continuing this question about DMs versus players, and the value of player input, and the manner in which the game is played.

Let me pull up a document from William Nolte, former director of education and training in the office of the Director of National Intelligence.  The paper, Keeping Pace with the Revolution in Military Affairs, discusses the decision making process and improvisation with the following quote:

"Music provides a useful analogy. Musicians, even in a classical setting with its emphasis on noting every tonal marking to the most calibrated point, may be able to adjust to a loss of beat on the part of the conductor. A baritone may realize that his tenor is experiencing vocal difficulties and increase his volume in a key duet, or even cover for the tenor in a climactic high note. But such adaptability is not the same as the jazz musician's bone-deep understanding that the marks on the sheet music (if he's even looking at sheet music) are not intended to limit improvisation. His or her permission to improvise is not contingent on making the best of a situation in which something has gone wrong. His 'permission' is much broader, much more inherent in the intent of his performance. Improvisation in this context is neither intuitive nor fortuitous; it is developed technique."

You can hear a deeper interpretation of this by Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, of Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers (one of the strangest musicians, ever) here (starting 18:30):



A few quotes from Baxter ...

"I gotta be honest with you folks, I am not interested in being an equal opportunity employer.  The stakes are too big.  I want talent.  I don't want to make this a game that's open for everybody."

"Improvisation means that, number one, you're willing to take a chance; number two, you're willing to push the envelope and number three, explore new possibilities; and number four, the most important, is that you're willing to fail."

"We are all as musicians, we come from the past.  My music, my guitar playing, is a conglomeration of everything from Charlie Parker's saxophone playing to Ludwig von Beethoven to Howard Roberts to B.B. King ... deconstructed so I could understand it, and then synthesized so I could create something new from it."

"There are two kinds of musical entities that we want to talk about.  One is a symphony orchestra ... and no disrespect to the incredible talent of the first violinist in the Los Angeles  Philharmonic or the guy who plays second bassoon in the Philharmonic, but mostly, orchestras are trained seals.  They're not stupid, but they're trained seals in the sense that their input into the music is basically reading what's written and follow the conductor ... it's his call.  So all information to the audience on the musical composition is going through this one choke point."

"What's the antithesis of that?  Is [sic] the jazz quintet.  Jazz is simple in the fact that it has some basic, basic tenets.  You start off with a theme, you end with a theme, and everything in the middle is improvisation."

What the general reader has to understand about me is that, like Baxter, I am a synthesis of a lot of different shit coming from a lot of different places.  And when I hear the genius of something like this above, I'm not concerned with quibbling things like my disagreements with Baxter's 'hard-wired' theory.  What I am interested in is his description of jazz versus the philharmonic ... and BAM!  Does that shit define a sandbox game or what?

How is it that I really know whether my players are enjoying the game or not?  It is the complete freaking ABSENCE of any division between what I am doing as DM and what they are doing as players.  If the player is riffing, and I am letting the player riff, then I'm not 'mastering' the player, I'm 'enabling' him.  I'm letting that player take risks, I'm letting that player get the shit out there so he or she can try something new, I'm backing that player up.  In short, I am getting the fuck out of the player's way.  And I know, down in the bottom of my soul, that this is working for the player because the player is cheering, the player is shouting, the player is sweating the possibility or failure or the player is urging on one of his or her buddies.  The evidence is in the GAME ... and I don't need handwritten vouchers from the players to find out if they're having a good time or what they're experiencing.  I am paying attention!

I've seen a lot of DMs, trapped behind their screens, buried there, managing their furtive little plans, organizing the various options they've chosen to offer the players.  When I wrote my little post about treating Rail Rodders decently, one of the chief arguments I received back, mostly on the forum, was that it was too damn much WORK to create more than one option for a party, and that there'd be work WASTED if the party chose to go the other way.

Can you imagine Dizzy Gillespie or Duke Ellington bitching that because the mood of the piece changed halfway through a jam, the sequence they'd been planning to play was 'wasted'?  What the hell?  The crime here isn't that the party isn't choosing the set of obstacles the DM has painstakingly created, the crime is that the DM can't create a set of obstacles in a few minutes during the campaign!

Cause I gotta tell you ... it is a LOT harder to teach yourself to improvise in a jazz combo, what with all the practice and brain-training you have to do, than it is to draw six rooms in sequence and populate those rooms with monsters, traps and treasure.  Seriously.  Do you want to learn how to play this fucking game or not?  Because I gotta tell you, I'm not interested in giving you poor sufferin' bastards any respect you ain't earned.  It's too damn important.  "I don't want to make this a game that's open for everybody."

Some of you are going to take that a bit hard.  Some of you are so used to everything in your lives being democratic, you're going to take a position that no matter how crappy you are at DMing, you have a right to do it so long as you have players.  Maybe.  Maybe.  It's your garage and its your band and if you want to tell yourselves you're the Clash because you feel you can thrash no matter how shit you are at it, I guess I gotta step back and say, great, you all have fun now.

But this ain't your garage.  This is the public eye, now, and when you vomit your simple-minded crap all over your blog, it ain't your buddies reading it.  It is all of us out here.  And we ain't your buds.  We ain't your families.  We don't have to be nice to you.

Where the conversation turns on what has to be done to make this game better, the DMs who want to run brilliantly, who want their worlds to reverberate like Barrett Deems playing with Louis Armstrong, it's time to recognize that if you're not going to do the work, you're out.  You're not needed.  You're fluff.  You're immaterial.  YOU DON'T COUNT.

This is a tough game, for tough people.  And I think that too often I waste too much time explaining things like economics to people who barely have a high school understanding of it, or geography to people who haven't got a clue where Iraq is, or game design to people who still think RISK is worth playing all afternoon (Sorry, I know that's going to hurt).  Truth be told, I played the hell out of RISK.  I played thousands of hours of RISK.  But it ain't holding my attention now, you know?  I haven't got the time.

Stop wasting your time doing a half-assed job.  Get better at this game.  Get rid of your DMs screen and get dirty with the players.  Roll the damn dice in front of them.  Show them that you can riff, and get them to riff with you.  Because when you stop treating them like mice in a maze - when you start letting them make the maze themselves - you're going to find you're not asking bullshit questions like, "Do my players like my world?" or "What about my world is it my players like?"

You will fucking know.  It won't be a mystery.  It will be balls-to-the-wall obvious.  What they like about your world is that it isn't YOUR world.

It's theirs.