Contact

The telescope points out into the sky
Tuned towards frequencies far back in time
Tracing a trembling pattern in ink
Awaiting the first touch
Of contact.

The spark of love
The comfort of feeling
Delicious anticipation of fingers to skin
Awaiting the first touch
Of contact.

These words don't mean
What you seem
To think that they do.

The drum machine circles his appointed rounds
The webcam records an empty room
Guitars in stands, shakers without hands
Awaiting the first touch
Of contact.

Bristle

The smell of Bay Rum
And powdered talcum
And of men far away from their wives

Every day after work
But before coming home
My grandfather stopped in at
His gymkhana

It was "Natives Only"
But outside that detail
It was a perfect scale model
Of a proper British Gentleman's Club

You could play lawn tennis
Or a rubber of bridge
And drink whiskey and soda
Or rum from the local sugarcane

The smell of Bay Rum
And powdered talcum
And of men far away from their wives

My father however
Did not join any clubs
Styling himself as a self made man
In the best of the American sense

Still it didn't seem right
To come straight home from work
So each afternoon
He stopped off at the barber's

The smell of Bay Rum
And powdered talcum
And of men far away from their wives

Styling myself as a self made man
In the best of the American sense
I shaved myself with a disposable Bic

Until the day when all razors
Came with five separate blades
Which seems absurd on the face of it
And quite patently ridiculous

So I grew out my beard
For the first time in years
And over time
It had turned salt and pepper

The black hairs are soft
Twisty tapered like ribbon
But the white hairs are stiff
And almost perfectly round

Though seeded together
They grow so differently
The beard on my face
Is at war with itself

So I went to the barber's
And sat in the chair
Observed my reflection
As he lathered the brush

And as he was about
To touch the blade to my throat
I said "shave it close and keep it clean
I want my face to be smooth
Like a fresh baby's bottom"

The smell of Bay Rum
And powdered talcum
And of men far away from their wives

Loose Thoughts

Jasper and Bob

A song about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. What is preferable: including a representation of reality in your art or including reality in your art? What does it mean to be an artist who can draw and paint vs. being an artist who can barely draw and really can't paint? How do these two approaches to making art relate to the personality of the artists, and how is the relationship between these two approaches to making art reflected in the relationship of these two artists?


Hutchinson Parkway

Hip sixties mom - grew up in New York, was an off-Broadway actress as a young woman, marries a college professor and moves out to the sticks to support his career and raise two children.

If you've gotta lie
You'd better do it with style
Just look them in the eye
And remember to smile

But I've got a tell
They can always tell
Because I just can't shake
This st-st-st-st-st
Stutter

She'd put her glasses in her purse
And purse her lips
Until her bright red lipstick
Was completely smooth
And then she'd straighten her skirt
Hugged tight to her hips
And go look them in the eye
And smile


The Last Human Champion

Dmitri called on the private line
Said "Garry, they are coming for you tomorrow"
So we took our packed bags
And jumped in the car
Drove to a dacha
On the outskirts of town.
Where we changed cars
And changed clothes
And drank a last toast with our friends
Before departing into the dark
And frigid Russian night.

South we drove
To the foothills of the Caucasus
Where we ditched the car
And met our guide
An Armenian shepherd
Who would take us through the pass

Three days walk
And we were once again
Among friends
A stone hut
In a valley
Armed bodyguards
On watch

I have to keep low, stay out of sight
But sometimes, late at night
I open the computer and the sat phone
And go out to play blitz
Beating all comers
Logged in as Anonymous.


You Were Born To Destroy That Which Created You

Since the Soviet Union fell I've wanted to write something about Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Sergei Krikalev and Leda and the Swan.





Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Negatively 5th Avenue

I'm sorry that you got the wrong impression.
Yeah I'm really sorry too
That stupid fucking me
Fucking stupid you
Is not going to happen this session.

Your problems are endless and always the same
The solutions are simple, but not implementable.
You need to shave, and go brush your teeth
Your breath is disgusting and your hygiene lamentable.

You think you're so vicious
So cutting, so malicious
Now get back in the kitchen
And finish doing the dishes.
You've got a lot of nerve.

We never could decide how to split up the spoils
So on the battlefield we left them to rot
And every single time that I didn't remember
You never ever ever forgot.

I would probably like you better if I didn't know you so well
But that hole has been poisoned. Oh just go to hell.
It takes two to tango. As you stand on my shoe.
You. You. You. You.

You think you're so vicious
So cutting, so malicious
Now get back in the kitchen
And finish doing the dishes.
You've got a lot of nerve.

Languishing in Language

Languishing in language
On the coast of Languedoc
The poets of the Provencale
Are stuck beneath the rock
Of native tongues and passing time
And changing circumstance
Arnaut Daniel picked up the winds
It is up to us to dance.

All In Dreams

I did a quick edit job on this for Pitar.

Original:

Far back as I remember
When life was playing games
In and around my home
It still comes to me in frames

Then off I went to school
Scared as I could be
Mom smiled a knowing smile
And she got a rest from me

Then the games were over
I was told I was a man
Scared again but willing
To work or kick the can

Then a uniform found me
And off I went again
A soldier for a nation
Still a child even then

Then a woman girl of virtue
Took up by my side
She took my soul as hers
To love and to abide

She offered up her body
Children were her gift
I could never tell her
How hard they were to lift

I work a job like many
But I often wonder where
I would be today
If I never gave a care

But most of all I wonder
Who I really am
If dreams reveal my choices
Has my life been just a sham

I could have been a hero
I could have been a thief
I could have been a better man
I’ve been them all in dreams

Does a hero find his courage
Does a thief unfold his schemes
Does stature find a simple man
All in dreams, all in dreams

All in dreams.

My edit:

I dreamt I was a dreamer
While life was playing games
I dreamt I was asleep at home
With frames inside of frames

I dreamt that I was back at school
I dreamt I was a man
I dreamt I was a soldier fighting
To work or kick the can

A woman nudged me gently
She offered up her body
I work a job like many
And heavy children carry

I could have been a hero
I could have been a thief
I could have been a better man
I’ve been them all in dreams

Does a hero find his courage
Does a thief unfold his schemes
Does stature find a simple man
I've seen them in my dreams

All in dreams.

4:33

Jazz and blues and rock and roll
Dance and trance and blue eyed soul
A silence here inside of me
I'm stuck playing 4:33

Europe, Asia and the road
Chicago in the winter's cold
The places people want to see
But nowhere is the place for me

You'll know me out here by my wink
A laugh or tear into your drink
A photon trapped inside the dark
Between the charmed and the strange quark

I'm packing up, I'm going home
Nowhere bound, to each his own
The silence has returned to me
I'm stuck inside 4:33

A Lucky Guy

Yeah I was 22
Been to college and made it through
Everything's good at 22

A lawn chair out on a flat roof
Greet the day at the stroke of noon
With a pot of espresso and that day's Tribune

Lazing in the sun
With the crossword done
Fire up the grill
Crack open a beer
And have some fun

Put on a shirt and then hit the bars
Bright orange sky pock-marked with stars
Sit on the swings in the dark in the park
With a head full of coke and some woman
Who was up
For a lark

Then the summer turned to fall
And the money ran out
And I met you

I'm a lucky guy
Like Rickie said
Just a lucky guy

Taken From Books

There's a woman who lives in a cave in the dunes
And a man in a box in the center of town
Keeps pushing a rock that will only roll down.
Meursault shot a man because the sun was too bright
Bigger killed Mary just because she was white
And wait, is that
A rhinoceros?

What is my life
Without your love?
And who am I
Without you?

A master beats his slave and a slave beats his master
The earth's turning backwards and time's running faster
I'm alone on a beach post-atomic disaster
We're locked here together till the end of time
There's a corpse on the table and no one knows why
And George and Martha's baby
(Never existed at all)

What is my life
Without your love?
And who am I
Without you?

There are 53 plants in the 17th row
The actors on stage have no more lines to know

She Didn't Say Anything

My mind is racing
Deconstructing the arrangement
Of "What is Life"
And "All Things Must Pass"
But she's just sitting there
Not saying a thing
Sipping her drink
Like Lana Clarkson
On Phil Spector's couch

It's like Citizen Kane
Or Sunset Boulevard
I didn't get smaller
But the music did
And she's just sitting there
Not saying a thing
Sipping her drink
Like Lana Clarkson
On Phil Spector's couch

That Johnny Ramone
He wouldn't play shit
He didn't understand
Till I showed him the gun
I've still got it
Do you want to see it?
But she just sits there
Not saying a thing
Sipping her drink
Like Lana Clarkson
On Phil Spector's couch

One Man Studio Band Artifacts

To follow up on the recording post, here are some artifacts from the last song I recorded.

Rhythm Section:

Tracking Mix:

Final Version:

New Year's Eve at Snowshoe

As The Band Played "All The Things You Are"
or
Dick Clark's Last Show


All the men at the table thought she was charming
All the women thought she was a whore
So they talked of marriage, and children, and childbirth
Until she could stand it no more.
And they turned to their men, and flattered their egos
Stroked and massaged, in the ways that wives know
And the men paid the checks, and they all left the banquet
To sing "Old Lang Syne" in the fluttering snow.
But Jon from Atlanta, with his new hair plugs and glasses
Got stroked and massaged by a competent pro
Cause you can't take it with you, and on New Year's Eve
You might as well spend it on hookers and blow.

Singing the Accounts Receivable, Dancing the Accounts Payable

He's a guy
(who knows some guys)
Who have some money
In Asia.
And right now
That's all
I know.
But until his guys pay him
(and he can pay me)
I'm afraid
The answer
Is no.

One Man Studio Band

The energy of musicians bouncing off each other is palpable, both live and in the studio, but when a single musician writes, arranges, plays, multi-tracks all parts, engineers, produces etc. then how does he keep the energy of the piece on the boil? How does he prevent it from sounding wooden? Is their a knack to keeping the feel of the piece alive and kicking? Is it a state of mind, or is it more complicated than that?

To start with, I'm not sure if I have enough perspective to really answer this. I've been pretty much a solo act for 15 years now (and I don't know if it is the impending holidays, the fact that I'm operating on four hours of sleep, or what, but just thinking about that reality threw me into a paroxysm of defensive rationalizations on the order of a middle aged divorcees answer to the question - "so, have you met anyone yet?" ).

But anyway, my experience in the studio is almost exclusively recording myself - I think Lee Knight has a lot more insight into playing and recording from both sides of the glass. That being said, here are some of my thoughts.

The studio is actually a terrible place for pen-and-paper style songwriting. I don't even turn on my DAW until I have the melody, chord progression and key lyrics already written. First step is to block out the drums. Start by figuring out exactly how many sections the song has, how many measures in each section, how many beats per measure, how many beats per minute. Pick a drum kit/sound, and create a basic midi drum pattern for each section, either using something from one of my midi drum libraries or playing it by hand on the keyboard. Make sure that the drum patterns match up with the rhythm of the melody and support the meter of the key lyrics. Generate drum fills to mark section transitions and hand edit/tweak the fills as necessary.

When I get all the sections of the drum track done I'll loop the drum track and run through the song on guitar or piano (whichever instrument I used for the pen-and-paper style composition) to make sure that everything works together. When I'm writing on a single instrument I don't always keep an accurate count of how many times I'm playing a given figure or notice that I needed an extra measure here or there to get from point A to point B, so frequently I have to go back and tweak the drum patterns.

Once the drums are done I lay down the bass. I'm a competent but not ambitious bass player - if the bass part has a groove and follows the chord progression I'm usually satisfied - it's very rare that I'm trying to drive the melody or show off some technique from the bass. I'll usually rough out the bass part against a loop of the drum track, but then I eq the drums so that the kick is extremely prominent and I can make sure that the bass part is going to lock in with the kick drum. If there is a particular phrase that I'm in love with on the bass that doesn't work with the kick I'll go back and edit the midi for the drums, but in general I try and play to the existing drum track.

When the bass track is done I'll loop the drums and the bass and run through the song on guitar or piano and make sure everything works together. I usually record a scratch track of this. Then loop the rhythm section and play the melody on a sympatico keyboard patch (usually organ these days) and record a scratch track of that.

That's probably 4-8 hours right there, so if that's done in a day I've had a pretty good day. Bounce a copy of the track to listen to and go explain to the family why I've been hiding in the basement all day and not doing anything worthwhile around the house.

Now it's time to work out the arrangement. Unlike the pen-and-paper composition process, the DAW is a great place to write the arrangement. In many cases, the arrangement flows organically out of the songwriting. If the solo acoustic demo already says everything that you want to say with the song, then you're done. If the song is firmly anchored in a particular genre you go with the standard arrangement components for that genre - a jazz standard is probably going to sound good with a clean guitar and piano, an R&B song is probably going to sound good with a crunch guitar and organ, a rock song is probably going to sound good with two clean/crunch/fuzz guitars, a dance song is probably going to sound good with phat synths and tempo-synched filters, etc.

On the other hand, I'm not usually super concerned with matching any particular genre marketing expectations, so this phase can be really creative/crazy/exploratory. However, unless there is some compelling reason not to, the arrangement will usually have at least one guitar part and one keyboard part. Writing the arrangement tends to be a lengthy process that overlaps with both tracking and mixing - if there is something that is making the mix impossible it probably has roots in the arrangement, and you have to fix the arrangement before you can fix the mix.

Ok, I think I've finally gotten to the point in the process that you are asking about.

I usually refer to this as Tracking. I'll defer to Lee's comments on this (if he chooses to contribute ) but for me tracking in the studio is almost completely unlike playing live with other musicians (especially in a jam-type situation).

When I'm tracking an instrument in the studio it is all about executing the part. The part is not necessarily written in stone before I start, but the only way it's going to end is with me executing the part in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY twice in a row. The part might be a verse, a chorus, some combination of contiguous sections or the whole song, but I am going to set the DAW to loop record and keep playing until I nail it twice in a row. Over the years I've gotten much better at this (I rarely have to track more than 4-5 takes these days), but when I started reproducibility was a huge problem.

Tracking, in it's very nature, is not creative. It's all about executing the part, and a lot of the parts are not, in themselves, musically challenging. I didn't go to music school to play a barre chord upstroke on the 2 and the 4, but a lot of times, that is what the song requires. When I'm tracking, I'm listening very hard for three T's - timing, intonation and tone - if any of those three T's diverge from the rest of the part it needs to be both intentional and expressive (and repeatable). Some ears, very little brain and mostly muscle memory.

You need to be in a disciplined, professional state of mind to do it successfully, and if the part doesn't wind up exhibiting some vitality or energy that's the fault of the writing, not the studio performance.

Writing the part is, superficially, more similar to playing live in a jam setting. In a jam you listen, understand, and react to what is going on around you; if you make a compelling new thematic statement you expect the arrangement to dynamically reconfigure itself to accommodate your idea. All the other parts of the arrangement exist at the same moment in time and are (reasonably) flexible. In the studio, you have to write your part of the arrangement before the other parts of the arrangement even exist, and once a part is written it is a PITA to change it, so you are largely confined to only using the open space left to you by the previous part writers.

To work around this, I try to be very conscious of how much space any part is taking up in the arrangement and to make this space as small as possible, especially for parts which come early in the arrangement process. I still struggle with this, but not fully appreciating this when I started doomed me to years of over-stuffed arrangements and unsatisfying mixes.

There is a fair amount of knob-twiddling that happens during the Tracking phase. Juiced about that new Fuzz pedal? Knock yourself out. Connect a line-level signal to a Hi-Z input by mistake and decide that you like it? Why not? But in addition to being fun and hopefully inspiring, your sound choices in the arrangement are going to have a direct and immediate impact on the mix. When I'm mixing I want a variety of textures; wave forms with transients and wave forms with sustain; instruments with a strong fundamental and instruments with a lot of secondary harmonics; coverage across the audible spectrum and no uncomfortable signal buildup in any one EQ band range. I don't want too many (any?) instruments using reverb, panning or delay at the track level, especially if those settings conflict with another instrument.

So there are a bunch of more creative elements in the arrangement and tracking - it's not all a grind. I suspect that I am more naturally disciplined than a lot of musicians, but even beyond that I just get really juiced and excited to be playing in front of a band that is really bringing it; driving the beat and riding the groove and letting me blow over some tasty changes.

Arranging and Tracking; deciding what to play, twiddling knobs, and actually playing it, takes a while - on the order of 1-2 hours per instrument per part. If a song has 3-4 sections and I manage to track all the keyboard and guitar parts in a day, that's been a good day. Bounce the track, get up from the chair and go upstairs to find out if anyone has thought about what to have for dinner.

Vocals and solos.

Given my druthers I would never sing on any of my tracks. I don't have a front-man style personality so I have never wanted to be the singer; I smoke, so my tone is inconsistent; as a lyricists I frequently write lyrics that are difficult, if not impossible, to deliver effectively; I have to mic the vocals so the room has to be reasonably quiet - vocals are just a drag. Still, the main reason I started songwriting was to have a cooler/more popular vehicle for my prosy-poetry; and there is no one else volunteering to sing my songs, so I suck it up and try to sing. Frankly, the less said about this the better.

I have the opposite problem with guitar solos. I love them too much. Objectively, I am a semi-competent but not very interesting lead guitarist. Why I think that entitles me to 16 or 32 bar solos is a mystery. Again, the less said about this the better.

Once all the tracking is done it's time to mix. I do believe that if you get the arrangement right, the mix should be a matter of just pulling up the faders, but it doesn't seem to turn out that way very often. After singing, mixing is my second least favorite part of the process - I don't have a great sounding room to mix in, a lot of time the arrangements are crap, the whole process is a lot of minute and fine-grained decisions with endless ramifications that I don't really hear until I bounce the whole thing, take it out to the car and realize "Wow, this isn't very good". Mastering is almost as bad except I care less - a compressor, non-surgical eq and reverb to taste. Bounce it, covert to mp3, upload to soundclick, post on the blog and then check back madly every 30 seconds to see if anyone listened. ;)

From the Coast of Malabar

A tee shirt and sandals for Christmas
Bulbs blink in the bar on the sand
No pine trees are here to be slaughtered
But there's a plastic one up on a stand
The music's a Malayam pop song
But there's no local word for reindeer
The drink is some black market whiskey
That takes me to a place far from here

Dublin is grey and it's snowing
The Chieftans with Cooder beside
A song called the Coast of Malabar
That I live out from the other side
I married that raven haired woman
Set down roots in this place far from home
But on days like the day before Christmas
I feel sad and like I'm all alone

And I remember with fondness that auburn haired lass
With freckles and eyes like green colored glass
But by evening I'll stand up and my mood will have passed
I'll come back to my raven haired wife and my home
My dusky hued brood, three sweet girls all my own
Pull out my oud and sing songs of today
Rice and sambar for dinner; enjoy Christmas day.


And here is the traditional Irish folk song, performed by The Chieftains and Ry Cooder:

Ornamental Cabbage

A little warm up instrumental from a hypothetical Sunday Jazz Brunch Jam.

Angry Birds

A little one-take instrumental about the iPhone game.

Cyberpunk circa 2002

The Adventures of Pip Cracker

1.1.1 Assembler Life
Flying Trapeze
Pip leans forward in his block, trying to piece together the bits of manpage in front of him. When he picked them up, he thought he was getting a recipe for making a stream device driver, but after two hours of pattern recognition all he has is a bunch of troff commands and a data section which doesn’t connect to anything else. He is about to give up, and try fetching again with another manpath, when a slow heavy crunching starts, first in the far outer cylenders and then echoing throughout the slice.
“Lucio, wake up man, it’s a fucking defrag! Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”
In the next block, Lucio stirs sleepily. For a sprite, the guy sleeps like a log. Or a narcoleptic. Or a dead man, if he doesn’t get a move on. It had been Lucio’s idea to go exploring in the varman, slipping out quietly for a few hours before anyone is awake, but with the defrag going on, they’ll be lucky to get back to home before dinner. Nanny will be pissed.
Pip grabs his kit and climbs out into the toxic air. Breathing through his respirator, he vaporizes the bits of his half assembled manpage and resets the block inode counter, covering his tracks, just in case. He locks the lid of his block and jumps across the void to get Lucio.
“Wake up Lucio. Grab your stuff. It’s a defrag. We’ve gotta catch a proc and ride it out.”
Varman, like all the other slices, is a vast warehouse of bit blocks arranged in a long spiral. Some slices have large, spacious blocks, but varman is one of the old-style slices, with barely room to turn around. Still, even the smallest blocks are a welcome respite from the toxic air of the warehouse with full life support systems, climate control and neatly stacked bit arrays. In the space between the tops of the blocks and the ceiling of the warehouse, spindle arms whirl in great circles. Attached to the bottom of the spindle arms are grappling hooks, which slide up and down the length of the arm to trace the spirals of the block layout.
In the distance, they see the one arm doing the defrag. Unlike the other arms, it swings very slowly, dropping its hook down into each block, opening the lid, and inspecting the contents. Most of the time it just restacks the bit arrays and puts the block away again, but if it finds any foreign material, like, for example, a naughty sprite out exploring, it pulverises the contents of the block, turns off the life support, and removes the hook from the top of the block, marking it as taboo for all time.
The spindle does a very thorough job, which, fortunately for Pip and Lucio, is correspondingly slow. Atop their abandoned havens, they stand with their fstick eyelets held high above their heads, waiting for one of the free spindles to swing by so that they can catch hold and ride it to another sector.
One, two three; they watch the spindles flying by, timing the seek speed and noting the orientation of the grappling hook. On the fourth pass, Pip nods to Lucio and bobs his fstick. “Steady, steady, NOW”.
The two sprites leap into the air, swinging their fsticks towards the dangling hook. Pip catches cleanly, but Lucio’s eyelet is too high, and clanks against the cable. Lucio kicks his legs, trying to levitate for another desperate second. Pip grabs the handle of Lucio’s fstick with one hand and yanks it downward while raising the hook with his other hand. Lucio’s dead weight yanks on Pip’s arm as the spindle swings away. Under the mechanical crunch of the equipment and the shrieks of his friend, Pip hears the soft click of Lucio’s eyelet catching on the grappling hook. The next instant, the pressure on Pip’s arm is gone and they are flying across the warehouse, with the sounds of the defrag fading into the distance.
As they approach the loading bus dock, they twist their fsticks loose and fly free, hitting the floor with a tuck and roll, and coming to rest against the front of an incoming queue of buffered ios. They unscramble themselves and move away from the door and the incoming stream of ios, telescoping down their fsticks and putting them back in their kit bags.
The loading bus dock is shaped like a wide corridor. The warehouse side of the corridor is completely open, and transfer arms move bits one at a time out to the receiving edge where they can be snagged by the spindle arms and delivered to their destination blocks. The opposite wall is a collection of channels, pneumatic conveyor cars which shuttle bits back and forth between the slice and kernelspace. Pip lies down on the dock floor, safely underneath the transfer arms, and watches the cars moving in and out of the channels.

Surfing
“Where do you want to go?”
“Let’s try surfing L2 cache.”
“It’s probably pretty dead right now.”
“That’s what you said last time, and it totally rocked.”
The last time they had been out in kernelspace had been an epic day. They were sitting in history class when the first tarball flew over. Mr. Hand, who despite being completely boring himself was totally keyed in to possible distractions, gave them both a sharp look, so they picked up their pencils again and tried to refocus on the grim dates and details of woah woah one. But by the time the seventh tarball came rushing across the sky woah woah one was a distant, surpressed memory, and after the twelveth tarball they were shimmying around in their seats like cats in heat, desperate for the bell to ring. When the bell finally, mercifully, did ring they rushed out of class, ditched their books, grabbed their wetsuits and headed for the beach.
As they scrambled down the path over the sea grapes a cluster of patches was coming down.
“Hurry up. It looks like a compete apt-get. Let’s go for L3.”
“I hate L3. The curl is really slow, and if you get caught in the eddy you could be there for the rest of the day. Let’s try L2.”
“The last time I was there I coredumped so bad.”
“Yeah, but the nurse wrote you a great excuse note for skipping assembly.”
Down at L2 it was already blowing three threads. They zipped up their wetsuits and headed out, pushing their boards. At the kiddie break they pulled up onto the rough board surface, nosing high over the whitecaps and paddling hard in the troughs. The flow was already pretty high, so the paging tide pulled them out quickly.
Out in the swell, Pip sat up on his board and surveyed the grey, heaving horizon. As far as he could see, the peaks were rolling in about 50 ns apart with a uniform break of 6-8 feet.
“They’re all keepers. Let’s go.”
Pip turned his board and climbed the back of a passing wave. He felt the wave start to grab him, and pulled back, to the edge of its reach, riding slowly forward to the edge of the coral shelf. As the wave picked up power, he turned and slid down into the trough, watching the break in front of him, rushing right to left, and counting beats as the wave behind him rolled forward. On five, he started paddling like a madman. At seven, he felt himself rising slightly, as the tip of the wave slid under the back of his board. At eight, the full strength of the wave reached him, and with a final, two armed pull he grabbed the edges of his board and raised up into his riding crouch, setting up crazy foot style, and leaned back slightly, turning the nose of his board down the length of the pipeline. The water spinning into the edge of the reef threw him forward. He swooshed down the face of the wave, piling gravity into the equation, and then turned back up, slowing as he approached the tip of the wave, and then turning again, rushing down again as the tip of the wave, still carrying the foam of his track, crashes into the shallows behind him.

Roller Coaster
“All right”, Pip answered. “Let’s give it a shot.”
Pip and Lucio crawl across the loading dock floor and climb onto the back of an outbound DMA transfer. Pip takes out his zip wand and compresses the block in front of him, so he and Lucio can squeeze on without causing a buffer overflow when they arrive in kernelspace. The transfer arms move a few additional blocks onto the train and then the train, feeling a full load, takes off.
The DMA transfer to kernelspace is a windy, twisty tube which rises, falls, coils and straights through a mass of other transfer routes and communications infrastructure. It was originally designed to handle the leisurely rhythms of sequential access tapes – hooking it up to modern storage devices is like driving an Indy car down a goat path. For normal blocks, it’s not too bad – if they haven’t repaved the road at least they pay a lot more attention to fastening the seat belts. But a sprite is not a normal block, and riding compressed is even worse – you have to keep yourself on the sled as well as the unwieldy deadweight directly in front of you, or be run over by the next train or zapped as a buffer underflow if you arrive without your cover block.
Pip holds on to the sled with one hand and uses the other to steady his block. He carefully watches the glowing track in front for advance notification of the next twist, adjusting his center of gravity as well as that of the block, and steeling his arms to deal with the g-forces to come.
The train starts with a straight, and then a hard right turn. After the turn they start rising in a tight spiral, corkscrewing counter-clockwise so tightly that the induced magnetic field causes Lucio’s hair to stand crazily on end. Pip just has time to point and laugh when the spiral ends and they start on a straight, steep descent. The sight lines in front fall away faster and faster as the descent gets steeper and steeper, until Pip has to operate on pure intuition. He closes his eyes for an instant and sees a loop loop down left. He opens his eyes to check, and is starting to yell the pattern to Lucio, when he sees that his friend is screaming like a lunatic and holding both hands in the air. As they enter the first loop, Pip closes his eyes again, this time not for intuition’s sake but so that he doesn’t have to see Lucio splattered against the tunnel wall.
Lucio must have gotten hold of his senses and his handles, because when Pip opens his eyes Lucio is still on his sled. The track slaloms through communication moghuls, left round right round right round left thud over thud over left right flat. Just as his arms are beginning to ache and tremble uncontrollably Pip sees a light ahead, the end of the ride, kernelspace.

1.1.2 Pursuit

Tracers
Pip and Lucio unzip their cover blocks and tumble out of their cars onto the buffer floor just ahead of the waiting bit verifier. Coming to a rolling stop, Pip realizes that the light was not the end of tunnel, it is the headlamp of an oncoming train.
When the last car in the input channel enters the buffer an alarm sounds and a spolight clicks on to illuminate the whole of the channel opening. As Pip and Lucio scramble towards sheltering darkness, they hear more alarms firing and an unbuffered stream of sensor readings flying towards an array of logwriters.
“Tracers!”
On a normal day, the DMA buffer is not a bad place to be. All of kernelspace is atmosphere conditioned, so they would have flipped off their respirators and sat back to enjoy the cool air. Unlike the creaky magnetic mechanics of the slice spindles, everything here is quiet and efficient, running silently on pneumatic beds of electric current. The buffer is huge, so if you move below the low-water mark there is plenty of time and opportunity to have a rest, take stock of your options, and plan your day. And if you just want to joyride, there is easy access to the IRQ port, which whisks you off to an awaiting runqueue with all the luxurious priority of a diplomatic motorcade.
Unfortunately, this is not a normal day. Things have changed, and, at least for our young sprites, not for the better. Someone is paying very close attention to the IO subsystem, receiving event notifications in real time as well as logging system calls for future reference. As a cracker, you survive by following two simple rules: don’t let anyone know you are there, and don’t let anyone find out that you ever have been there. Tracers up the ante on both fronts.
Pip moves farther back into the darkness and tries to figure out the mask on tracer events. Clearly, read is on, since they tripped that when they arrived. The logwriters seem to work without alarms, so write may be off, but more likely it is just bypassing the system calls and just using raw registers. As another DMA train arrives Pip swivels towards the IRQ port, just in time to see the darkness obscured by the ignition flash of a spotlight.
“Shit, they’re watching interrupts too. Kiss that runqueue goodbye.”
“Let’s just longjump out of here. This is crazy.”
Before Pip can respond, Lucio has his jump pointer out and is scanning for stored offsets. The dial stops at 0x00100000 and the display reads “_text”. Lucio nods to Pip and begins his jump.
“Lucio, wait, we haven’t recalibrated since…”
But his friend is already dissolving into the transport beam. Faced with the prospect of frying alone in the frying pan or frying together in the fire, Pip jumps into the unknown.

The Year In Review

Lyric:

April grey
Empty beach
Sand and waves
In my reach

Cherry blooms
Falling snow
Empty rooms
Does Spring know

Summer day
Oh that dress
You wore

Autumn leaves
Love remains
More than needs
Phantom pains

Falling snow
Cherry blooms
Sand and waves
Empty rooms

Summer day
Oh that dress
You wore

Winter day
Terns and waves

Summer day
Oh that dress
You wore

Chords:

Verse
Cmaj7 D6
Emin7 A7

Chorus
G A C9 D

Bridge
C#dim F#7 Bm7 E

A Hard And Demanding Man

My father was a hard and demanding man
Though he did not think of himself as such.

He was there for all my childhood failures
His gestures made hollow by the sadness in his eyes
He always acted as if he had come up from nothing
Although I know he had been given much more than he managed to retain.

And for years and years I do believe
That he did hold it against me
That on the day when I finally left his house
That on that day I said to him:

“I'm not like you dad - I'm clumsy and weak
I'm not like you dad
I'm not like you dad - I'm clumsy and weak
I'm not like you dad”.

As he got older and his drinking took its toll
I went down to the hospital.
We sat together in silence
Finally, he said to me:

“My father was a hard and demanding man
But he always did his best by me.
I am truly sorry
That I could not do the same for you”.

“I'm not like my dad - I'm clumsy and weak
I'm not like my dad
I'm not like my dad - I'm clumsy and weak
I'm not like my dad”.

My father was a hard and demanding man
I'm not like my dad
My father was a hard and demanding man
I'm not like my dad