SteveCastellano.com

Read part one here.

piece of cake really

When I was thirteen or so I read the novelization of Close Encounters (because it was lying around the house and I was thirteen and bored, smartass). The chapter in which the big-ass modular synthesizer appeared opened with a statement somewhere along the lines of “There are few people in the world who can afford a Moog modular synthesizer, and even fewer who know how to program one.” That’s an odd thing to say for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the synth in the movie was actually an ARP 2500, not a Moog. But secondly, as much as it serves the drama of the setting to deny it, and as easy as it is to be overwhelmed by all the cables and dials and switches, an analogue synthesizer is not really all that difficult to wrap your head around. I could teach you how to patch a modular synth in a couple of hours. It would take a little more experience for you to be able to sit down at one and duplicate a sound you heard on an album, but the principles, and the components and variables involved, are pretty straightforward.

I don’t know why they needed an ARP 2500 (or the big monochrome light organ) to play that five-note message from the aliens. By 1977 there were quite a few synths that could have done the job just as well with a lot fewer cables. Of course, it wouldn’t have looked quite as cool if that scene was done on a Minimoog, but with the right amplification it would have sounded pretty much the same. And Moog had been making those since 1970.

In the pre-digital days, manufacturers had to compromise flexibility for usability; they had to reduce complexity in order to make their instruments easier to program. Synths like the Minimoog or Prophet-5 contain circuitry which is representative of all the individual components you might find in a typical modular system from the 70s, assembled into a configuration that would be more practical for performers and recording artists. In a live situation, or in a studio when you’re paying by the hour, you want to be able to access your program parameters quickly and easily. These instruments allowed you to have all the controls that you need at your fingertips, but you lost the ability to run your LFO through the lag processor. Which, for most situations, was not a huge sacrifice.

not such a great idea in retrospect

Then digital comes along, and everything changes (okay, yes, the Prophet-5 had a lot of digital circuitry already, but let’s not confuse the general interest students) – manufacturers decided that if you could have a display screen that could tell you what parameter you’re adjusting, you could have just one big knob (I heard that, you in the back row) that could control all your parameters. You don’t have to have all those troublesome, confusing potentiometers cluttering up your front panel. You can then fill it with buttons that will recall all the different sounds that are now stored in digital memory. And then you end up with the Moog Source, which I think is probably the least desirable instrument ever created by Moog (in 1981, without the participation of Robert Moog, who had left the company several years earlier).

The next generation of synthesizers had a comparatively mind-boggling number of patch parameters with almost no real-time access. The Yamaha DX7, the most popular synthesizer ever released, has hundreds – possibly thousands, I never counted – of individual parameters per sound, and yet the front panel consists of 32 patch recall buttons, three sliders and a two-line LCD. But no one really cared because you pretty much needed an engineering degree to program one anyway.

This approach obviously creates a usability problem for people who want real-time access to those parameters, and after a few years of membrane switches and alpha dials, manufacturers realized that they were neglecting the needs of a significant customer base. The Roland JD-800 is a great example of a digital synth with a fully tweakable analogue-style interface, and it was very popular among those who could afford it. But once digital freed instrument designers from the fairly simple building blocks of analogue synthesis, samplers, ROMplers, FM and wavetable synths all became essential tools in the synthesist’s arsenal, and it was no longer practical to consider putting dedicated knobs and switches on the front panel of a synth. (Yes I know who Dave Smith is, pipe down, you.)

The advent of digital synthesis did not, however, magically eliminate the desire in performers, composers and enthusiasts to create and modify their own sounds. It just made the editing process a bit more of a pain in the ass. Fortunately, the digital synthesizer revolution was propelled by the same wave of technological advancement that was making the home computer a reality for the technologically-inclined consumer. And if you were interested in delving into the mysteries of FM synthesis, and if you had an Atari and a MIDI interface, you could design your own sounds, or modify the ones you bought from the music store, on that tiny little black and white screen – which, primitive though it may look now, was quite an improvement over that tiny LCD on the synth. All you needed was a DX7 Editor/Librarian. Create and modify your sounds with the editor, and then store them by the thousands (the original DX7 could only hold 32 patches in memory at a time unless you had the optional cartridge) and organize them with the librarian.

hey look it still works

Then one day it occurred to some clever programmer (I assume he had more than one digital synth of his own) who decided that it was foolish to have a bunch of different applications, each of which did the same thing – exchange MIDI messages with synths and display sliders and envelope generators onscreen – for a different synth. I’m not sure what the first software to do this was. The makers of Midi Quest only claim that it is “the oldest actively supported software dedicated to getting the most from your MIDI hardware,” but I can’t find any hard dates claiming anyone else got there first. There was also Dr. T’s XoR, which evolved into MOTU’s Unisyn, which is also still available.

My universal editor of choice was called SoundDiver, and was made by Emagic, the same guys who made Notator for the Atari under the name C-Lab. You were wondering where this would all come together, weren’t you? I spent countless hours sorting, categorizing, and editing sounds on a number of synths – though mostly on my Kurzweil K2000, which was the most versatile and complex of the bunch – in SoundDiver. And when you collect synths, and work at music stores, and convert DX7 patches to TG77 format, and assemble keymaps from samplesets you download from the internet, for a few years, you end up with a lot of sounds. And once you have a lot of sounds, you have to sort through them and decide which ones you want to use. And you will add keywords to your library. And you will go in and tweak them, and re-save your tweaked sounds with new names so that your originals remain untouched. And you will keep track of which multi setups and combinations use which “children.” And if you have one program that allows you to do all this in one editing and cataloguing environment, you will be the master of your domain, as I was, for a time.

And then something interesting happened. Apple bought eMagic in 2002. We all thought this was pretty good news. The developers who made all that great software get to work for Apple, and probably got some decent coin out of the deal, and as a Mac user who was already using Logic I’m happy because it means my favourite audio software is going to be supported by the guys who make the hardware and operating system I’m running it on. It wasn’t such great news for Windows users however, as support for Windows versions of Emagic products was abruptly and unceremoniously dropped.

sort of

If that made users of SoundDiver on the Mac platform feel a bit smug, that feeling would fade gradually over the next year or two. As a hardware manufacturer, Apple had little incentive to support other manufacturers’ instruments. Logic already contained a number of virtual instruments when Apple acquired Emagic, and these instruments required a significant amount of processing power. Simply put, you can run your hardware synths off an Atari 1040. But if you want to play the latest and greatest softsynths, samplers and emulators included in Logic Pro 7 (released in 2004) you needed to buy a shiny new Mac. SoundDiver was quietly throttled, and all that remains of it is an OS X public beta which you still need the otherwise obsolete USB dongle to operate. But as development also ceased on the adaptions – the modules that contain the communication protocols for your hardware – even if you can get the public beta up and running on your Mac (and I can) you won’t be able to use it on any synth manufactured after 2003.

Is there a moral to this long and heartbreaking story? Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. But when the glory of hardware fades, at least you’re still left with the hardware. I’ve got about a billion TG77 patches on Atari floppies, none of which I expect to hear again. I’ve also got a fully-functional 30-year-old Prophet-5 in an Anvil case in the basement, and I sometimes think the money I’ve spent on now-obsolete software could have bought me another one.

My wife and I went to see Kate Rusby at Hugh’s Room in Toronto’s west end two Sundays back. She’s had limited exposure here in Canada, though true anglophiles will know her as the singer of the theme song for the understated comedy Jam and Jerusalem, which comes highly recommended to fans of French and Saunders, Father Ted and so forth – though it has a much lighter touch than its antecedents. The theme song is the Kinks’ The Village Green Preservation Society, and Rusby imbues it with a rustic innocence and wistful melancholy.

This is not a concert review, but I must say that Rusby was a revelation, and luckily her absence from Canadian stages, by her own admission due in a large part to her fear of flying, is compensated for by the fact that she has more than half a dozen CDs to her name, all of which are available for purchase from the Pure Records site.

And while Rusby’s delicate and unabashedly northern-accented voice instantly transports you to a land with a grey sky that may or may not clear some day, where you stand on a lush green hillside with the smell of hay in your nostrils, and where you may or may not be crying but it is almost certainly raining on your face, her self-effacing charm and infectious humour will disabuse you of any expectations that she is some distant wan depressive. In between heartstring-pullers she regaled the crowd with stories of dressing her dog up in a Superman costume, and of gigs that had to be called off midway due to uncontrollable fits of laughter onstage.

If you’re not quite convinced of how cheerful, polite and winning Kate Rusby was on Sunday night, this ought to do it: mere moments into her set, she declared to the audience that she and her entourage had just been treated to an “absolutely lovely” meal. At Hugh’s Room.

Before this gets really ugly, I want to tell you that I like Hugh’s Room. It’s a warm, intimate room with good sight lines, and they manage to pull in some truly great performers. I’ve seen Kelly Joe Phelps there a couple of times, likewise Jane Siberry, Leon Redbone, Colin Hay, Nathan and a number of others. I would go there more often, but the problem is to get a good seat you have to get a dinner reservation, and the food is nearly inedible.

Why don’t I just reserve a table and not eat? I might just be too politely Canadian. But when I’m looking forward to a concert, I don’t generally think a confrontation between me and the waitstaff is going to help me to relax and enjoy the music. Plus, I’m not heartless. I know they’re trying to run a business. I keep trying to find something that I can nibble on that won’t make me as angry as a fight with my server might. I keep failing. I wonder how receptive they would be to a promise that I will happily consume the value of their prix fixe dinner in wine and beer?

The servers are often quite understanding. I remember being warned off some particularly overblown vegetarian option on one occasion. She might have seen my eye lingering on the madness of grains, seeds and raisins in the description and mistaken my confusion for anticipation. Her suggestion that we avoid that particular dish was unnecessary, but taken in the spirit intended. I only wish that she, or any server since that evening some years ago, had ventured to suggest something that I might actually enjoy eating. I give them points for their tacit honesty.

There was a dish, some time ago, that I found palatable. Penne and some kind of hot Italian sausage in a red sauce. This would have been at the Colin Hay show, I think. But since then my luck, and mercifully my memory, has not held out. I forget what my entrée was for the Redbone show. The appetizer, a caesar salad, is however indelibly etched in my mind. You see, after a few dinners at Hugh’s you will stop merely avoiding the dishes that look dicey, you will start eyeing the familiar favourites with the question “how can they possibly make me not want to eat this?” in mind. And so we come to the caesar salad. What’s the worst caesar you ever had? Are you okay with the one from the deli in the food court? If there is a little too much dressing, would you not just scrape it off with your fork? Would you say “hold the parm” at the last minute if you saw them reaching for that devious Kraft cylinder?

I think the lettuce was described in the menu as a “wedge of romaine.” That was a blatant lie. It was an entire head of romaine lettuce. Not a delicate tender yellow-green heart, a single, entire head, such as might be left if you grabbed one out of the bin at the supermarket and peeled off the outer 4 leaves. It sat there in the middle of my plate like a clown shoe, drizzled in a zigzag pattern with dressing squirted from a mayonnaise dispenser, with a single crostini leaning up against it. My dinner companion wanted me to send it back. “They can’t expect you to eat that,” she insisted. I gauged the futility of suggesting they take another swing at creating a salad as I watched a sea of identical dishes being distributed throughout the restaurant like some all-vegetable re-enactment of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I soldiered on. My butter knife was neither long nor sharp enough to hack through it entirely. My lone crouton shattered under my fork and shot off the table.

And so, faced as I was this weekend past with the prospect of another puzzling and regrettable meal, I spent some time analyzing the posted menu, weighing its potential strengths and weaknesses, plotting a bullet-proof course of action. “There,” I stabbed a finger at my monitor. “The cheese plate ($15).” My faithful companion vowed she would dare nothing riskier than pita and dip ($9) with a side of wine. They’re folkies, after all, they must be able to whip up some hummus. My metabolism tends to run a little hotter; I knew I wasn’t making it out of there without an entrée. I chose my adversary: chicken pot pie ($16).

There was no point considering the “concert special” prix fixe. I’m not the kind of penny-minding cynic who assumes that every prix fixe is a rip-off, with the cost of the main buried in an overpriced starter. But we could probably manage to spend less than $32 apiece on our meals. And the last time I ordered a tempting dessert it ended up being one of those frozen lava cakes that you heat up in the microwave.

The evening did not start well. We were seated at a two-spot about the size of a postage stamp, against the south wall. I tried to make the best of it. “I’m not sorry I didn’t bring my camera now,” I said with a shrug. We were both thinking the same thing: we brave the food in order to get a good seat. But now we’re just fucked.

We dove into the rolls, but they were of the sort that you might get pre-bagged at the bakery counter at Loblaws, with the driest ones artfully placed on top as though they’d been waiting for us in situ since about noon. We ordered a couple of glasses of viognier and, just for pure theatre, inquired after the “mussels of the day” which, for the past 5 years, have always been an unthinkable coconut curry.

“Tomato and herb,” we were told. My wife and I looked at each other in amazement. If only we were seated at a table large enough for a single plate of mussels, let alone two with a bowl for shells. Then our “how can they screw this up” credo crossed our minds like scudding clouds. We decided to pass.

“What’s on the cheese board,” I asked.

“Just what it says there,” our server replied, helpfully. I glanced again at the menu. It said “Assorted cheeses.” Well, it’s cheese then, isn’t it. It also said seasonal fruits, nuts, apple butter – accessories more suited for an after-dinner plate, but given the circumstances, a small concern. Those I could read, in any case. I couldn’t imagine her coming back from the kitchen and listing off names of cheeses that I wouldn’t want to eat, so I changed my tack. “Enough for two?”

I fancy she rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah,” she said.

My wife ordered the pita, which came with two dips. “And what are the dips?”

“One is sweet potato, the other is goat cheese and pear.”

A scribbled thought bubble such as you might have seen illustrating Lucy’s state of mind in a Peanuts strip began to form over my wife’s head. She hates pears.

“No hummus at all, in the kitchen, then?”

Our waitress was beginning to sense trouble. She squinched up her face as though she really wished she could help. “Sorry, no.”

I shrugged sheepishly, involuntarily. Even by our lowered expectations this was not going well. But finally my chicken pot pie was ordered. There was hope. Until our server returned with the inevitable news: at quarter past seven, they were out of the chicken pot pie. Our server apologized, but there had been a run.

“It was the only thing people knew they could stand,” my wife muttered. I winced. I looked over the list of entrées again, and again. I willed myself to have missed something simple, comforting, satisfying. I had not.

I am a man of fairly simple needs and pleasures. I require that a dish with a price tag north of $12 contain meat. I pretty much require meat, in some form, at every dinner. But I’m not a neanderthal. There are exceptions. Squash ravioli. Eggplant parmigiana. And fish, of any variety, qualifies as meat in my secular household. So the butternut squash risotto ($18), which I had tried before and found inoffensive but unremarkable and stingy, and the vegetable paprikash ($16) were out. Why could I gain no purchase on this menu? In retrospect, it was the sauces. The pumpkin seed basil pesto on the shrimp trottole (I feel that either basil or pesto in that description is redundant). The apple-cranberry molasses sauce on the pork. The bourbon-soaked raisin cream sauce, for God’s sake, on the roast chicken.

At last, Atlantic salmon. I don’t usually order salmon in restaurants, for the same reason I don’t order egg salad; we are quite capable of making it ourselves. my wife is responsible for the cooking, for the most part. Blackened and spicy. Maybe baked or with shallots, sage and lemon slices. Once a week, usually. With an unassuming pinot grigio or unoaked chardonnay. I am spoiled. But salmon is, after all, a big thick slab of a thing that is pretty easy to cook, and whatever you drizzle over the outside, if it turns out to have been a mistake, can be gracefully scraped or spunged off to reduce its overall effect. Salmon is salmon. Fatty and tasty, yet light and healthy. The perfect compromise, hold the compromise.

We finish our wine as we wait for the cheese. “Maybe there was a line-up at the Loblaws,” my companion suggests.

Finally it arrives, as promised, in quantity. I see why the server misinterpreted my question; there’s Brie, a mound of crumbly blue, and a stack of mild cheddar, cubed, family-reunion style. What other kinds of cheese are there, really? We suspect it really did come from the Loblaws, prepackaged. I have to admit that for $15 it was not bad value; we couldn’t finish it between us, and juggled the remnants on our bread plates as we jockeyed them around making way for our mains.

Have you seen Reuben, Reuben? At one key moment Tom Conti, playing a drunken, Dylan-esque poet, is spied by a couple of ornery waiters clumsily pocketing tips from recently-vacated tables. In a vaguely bizarre and cinematic attempt at payback, they humiliate him on his next visit by answering his complaints of small portions with an unsummitable matterhorn of chicken parts. Was this now happening to me? Did my wife’s aspersions on the menu earn me the ignominy of this cedar-plank-sized loaf of overdone salmon, which was 400 grams if it was an ounce? The vegetables were a mixed bag, pre-peeled baby-finger carrots of the type that get carved out of larger carrot pieces that you’d rather not eat, and broccoli half-bleached from lack of sun. The green beans were tasty and crisp, though untrimmed and plated haphazardly.

The pita bread appeared, much like the cheese, to have come straight from a shopping bag, cold and dull, without so much as a few seconds on a grill to acclimatize it to its new environment. The sweet potato dip had the consistency and subtlety of pie filling. My wife barely touched it, and it was later comped without an explicit request.

I’m not particularly enamoured of Gordon Ramsay or the roster of “let us fix your restaurant” reality shows that he inspired. I’m not a chef, and, surprisingly for a musician, I have never worked in the service industry. So I’m hardly qualified to offer advice on the subject. But the food at Hugh’s has been so bad for so long, and needlessly so, that I feel I have to offer some kind of suggestion, in the hopes of making everyone’s next visit a more comfortable one. And I will be back, in spite of it all; it’s simply the only club some bands frequent. Here are a few suggestions from a guy who goes out to eat once in a while, and occasionally shops somewhere other than Sobeys, to whoever is running the kitchen at Hugh’s:

Upscale your bread. You’re catering to a folkie audience. Set them up with some heartier artisanal bread, something with some seeds in it. Something that looks like it was baked by a human being.

Portion control. I will happily pay the same amount for half a romaine head as I will for a full one. It’s a salad. I’m only eating it out of a misplaced sense of duty to my mother. And a pound of salmon thrown on a plate is not a bargain, it’s a gauntlet. Make flavour and customer service your value; I can get quantity pretty much anywhere.

Aim to please, not to impress. You’re over-reaching with the current menu. There are so many things that can be cooked more simply and with less of a margin for error. Don’t put a crazy sticky sweet sauce or demi-glaze on everything. Make the raisins optional (and see how many people opt out). And keep in mind people paid a few bucks for tickets already, don’t soak them $26 for steak frites that they can get for $20 anywhere else in town. Go out and visit some other restaurants and get some ideas. How about a falafel plate for the aging hippies? How about a hamburger or a lamburger, or just a nice sandwich?

On the other hand, stop letting your mom make the cheese board. There are lots of great cheese shops in town, which means a lot of your customers buy cheese that isn’t mass-manufactured. You’re a few minutes’ drive from the Cheese Boutique, and the Leslieville Cheese Market has a Queen West location now. Stop by sometime and ask for a consultation. Consider two cheese plates, one for before dinner, and a different one for dessert. Pair the dessert and late-night platter with a port, maybe.

Pair a host or hostess with the ticket-taker at the door. I want to be greeted once and taken to my table. I don’t want my reservation confirmed only to have to stand at the threshold of your dining room like a lost kid at the train station. The show doesn’t start for another hour and a half. Someone has time to take me to my table.

Look, Hugh, I don’t go to dinner looking for a fight, or even to review. But plenty of talented restaurateurs in town would kill to have your captive dinner audience, and it pains me to think what someone who actually knows what they’re doing could make of the opportunity that you are wasting night after night. The vibe off the stage is consistently friendly. So feed us like your friends, not airline passengers.

I really have to work on my rhetorical style. And by that I mean to say that I don’t think it’s the rhetoric that’s the problem so much as the delivery. I make what I think is – what I know to be a perfect conversation-ender and then turn as if to walk away, and at that instant, someone says “Yeah, it’s like when…” Some of them know what they’ve done as soon as they do it. “I have nothing to add,” a colleague once stammered. “And now you’ve added it,” I told him.

And so it was when I sent out the above cartoon to some marketing colleagues. What I expected were replies along the lines of “LOL” or perhaps knowing nods in the company kitchen, accompanying co-workers saying, “Got that thing, it was effing righteous.” But that’s not what I got. I got, “You should write a blog post about that.”

Now I’m in the awkward position of trying to elucidate what we could have all pretended was some wry, sage, unspoken statement about our jobs, and the state of marketing in general, and left it at that. But we didn’t pretend, or leave it at that, and so this blog post is going to be like The Gospel According to Peanuts, only about a million times more soulless.

Just as a quick recap, I work in marketing. I work for an advertising company. So I can truthfully say, when asked my occupation, that I am a writer who works for an advertising company. But the question that always follows that is, “Have I seen any of your work?” And my truthful answer is always, “No, not that kind of advertising. Not the cool advertising. I write mostly digital and direct. What you unwashed masses would refer to as banner ads and junk mail.” It would be equally truthful for me to continue to explain that there is more, oh, so much more to it than that, but just because it’s the truth doesn’t mean it’s worth my time to explain, or yours to listen. Suffice it to say, this ain’t Mad Men.

Likewise, the idea that the client insists that we make the logo bigger is a trope, but with the kind of blue-chip clients we deal with it’s not even so true anymore. They don’t have to tell us how big to make the logo; they have a cirlux-bound book of brand standards that we swore on as if it were a floppy bible, on pain of a thousand mind-numbing emails from a cadre of humourless corporate lawyers, that tells us on their behalf. And if you didn’t spot the redundancy in the last sentence, it was the word humourless.

What we do get asked to do, however, is make the call to action bigger (like so many things in our business, the part of the ad that tells you what to do has a super-secret marketing name and an acronym to go with it). The call to action, or CTA, is the “act now” bit at the end; the URL; the 800 number; the part that tells you what to do if you like the thing that the ad is telling you about. The CTA has to pop. It has to be in a coloured box. It should, perhaps, be a “hot” colour like red or yellow. A former president at one agency I have worked at called, quite straight-facedly, for a design standard in which the CTA was “as big as the headline.”

Well I used to be an art director, and I still have some vestigial knowledge of what kinds of problems these suggestions can cause from a perspective of visual aesthetics. And what you can’t really tell people about aesthetics in marketing and advertising if they don’t already believe it is that the way your stuff looks, in particular how good it looks, how much respect it shows for the visual cortex of your audience, speaks to the character of your brand as clearly as your headlines – which is why a former creative director of mine suggested, in typically diplomatic and understated terms, that we attempt to “err on the side of good taste.”

And what I know as a writer (a senior writer, if you please), is that no one is going to act now, or act at any time, if that action isn’t going to make them better off, in their own estimation, than they would be if they did nothing. Which means we have to give some weight and thought to what the hell is so cool about what we’re trying to sell them. This seems obvious to me, and to many people I talk to – but surprisingly it’s not obvious to absolutely everyone. I don’t fault my clients for loving their products. Their products are as much their children as my first draft copy decks are mine. But unless you’re Apple (and maybe we’ll have a chat about blind Apple adoration sometime in the future) you are on thin ice if you just assume that a big old hero shot of your product and a bone-dry list of techs and specs is enough to compel them to jam a crowbar into their wallets and buy one from you.

Look at it this way. All offers are essentially discounts. Order by x date and save y. Or maybe we’ll send you some kind of tchotchke or throw in some service that we’re going to try to convince you that you wanted anyway, so by giving it to you for free we’re saving you money; same difference. But a discount on something your potential customer is not sure he or she wants – about which the benefit has not been communicated to their satisfaction – is hardly a bargain. You might as well be giving away free pieces of paper. But if you can manage to convince them that your product is worth owning, and will benefit them in some way, they might end up actually wanting to read the CTA. And if  the reader is actively seeking it out, maybe it doesn’t have to be the same size as the headline, or in a neon colour, or in a starburst. Maybe you can shrink it down to a more reasonable size.

Like, say, the logo.

the obsolete logic hardware key

I talk a lot about music hardware on this site, but the music that I write wouldn’t sound like much without software. Logic is my main audio production app, and I’ve been using it in various incarnations since about 1989, when it was called Notator SL, and was available exclusively on the Atari ST platform.

At that time Performer, by the embarrassingly named Mark of the Unicorn (more commonly known as MOTU for obvious reasons), was all the rage, but Macs were out of the price range of students and many Europeans, leading German software companies like C-Lab and rival Steinberg to create some truly kick-ass sequencing software for the less expensive Atari.

So in that respect I’m pretty lucky; I backed the right horse for once, and in spite of some kind of rift at C-Lab that resulted in a new company called Emagic, and the buyout of Emagic by Apple (there’s a detailed history  at TweakHeadz Lab), I can actually dig out files I worked on 15 years ago and import them into my current setup.

In other respects, I’m like anyone else, in that I’ve been heavily reliant on music software that is no longer supported, and which has been rendered obsolete by seismic changes in Mac processors and operating systems over the years. And the more I invest in software instruments – my current arsenal consists of Logic Studio, Reason 4, and Native Instruments Komplete 6 – the more vulnerable I am to the sudden dissolution of any of the companies that produce them.

Bitheadz Retro AS-1, which I used to refer to as the “Retro-Ass” synth, was one of the earliest consumer-level real-time analogue synth emulators, and it worked pretty well on my 266 MHz PowerMac. I still have the install disk somewhere, which means I could install it on an XP box if I felt the need. Thankfully I don’t feel the need, really, and all I’ve lost is my initial investment of $250 or so – though I was pretty cheesed when these guys went under, without so much as a gurgle. As of now, there’s certainly nothing I needed the Retro-Ass to do that I couldn’t duplicate with Logic’s ES2 or a number of the NI synths. But there passed a few long years during which this was not the case.

Propellerheads RB-338 was from the same era, and emulated the Roland TR-303 bass synth and TR-808 and 909 drum machines. It emulated their user interfaces as well, which had a lot to do with the 303′s idiomatic lines in particular; that interface resulted in a lot of melodies that no one would have come up with first on a bass or a keyboard. It wasn’t quite powerful enough to construct a song on its own, but it laid the groundwork for Reason, which is gradually evolving into a soft-synth based audio workstation with the recent introduction of Record.

Propellerheads did a great and generous thing when they pulled the plug on ReBirth, in that they released a Reason ReFill with all the ReBirth sounds and made it available for a free download. Of course, you no longer had the 303 or the UI. And if you had been downloading the user hacks, which replaced all the sounds in the drum machines with user-created samples, of course you didn’t have those anymore either.

look i still have the manual and everything

Aside from Notator, the music app that I spent the most time in on the Atari was an amazing patch editor/librarian for my Yamaha TG77 called Synthworks SY77, made by Steinberg. The SY/TG77 is a hybrid synth that was both a ROMpler and an FM synth, boasting “Advanced FM” (AFM) synthesis. AFM2 gave you access to not only sine wave operators but more complex op waveforms and even ROM samples as operators, plus resonant digital filters, which was pretty groundbreaking at the time. I amassed a huge collection of sounds for this machine that would have been impossible to create and maintain without Synthworks.

Considering the fact that the Atari had no hard drive, merely an internal DD floppy drive (I had the external floppy drive as well, which made me some kind of power user), 1MB of internal RAM, and an 8MHz processor, Synthworks did a phenomenal job of indexing, retrieving, and comparing over 3,000 patches. But Synthworks was also a powerful editor, giving you intuitive graphic controls for the SY77′s myriad parameters, even allowing you to create FM algorithms that were not available from the front panel of the hardware unit itself. It could also generate random patches based on a selection from the library, or allow you to proportionally mix parameters from up to four separate sounds using a simple point-and-click graphic interface. Neat-o! And while this software hasn’t been supported for over a decade, I still refuse to admit that it’s dead – I still have the software, an Atari, and the hardware dongle, in case I ever decide to fire the TG77 up again.

Stay tuned for part 2, I’m going somewhere with this, honest.

Sorry about those trees, we'll have them cut down immediately.

I have often said, of my day gig in advertising, “If this job is ever difficult, it’s because somebody screwed up.” You might think that’s pretty upbeat coming from me until you realize that only one screw-up has to be signed off on to make an entire campaign, or even a brand, difficult. And sometimes one screw-up is made up of a bunch of tiny, intricate, co-dependent screw-ups. Conversely, one screw-up that happened years ago can continue to resonate in work I have yet to complete. You get it. It’s like that old chaos theory chestnut.

I haven’t worked on either of these brands so I can only guess at what made these ads into a punchline. Many will immediately blame a failure of creative imagination; others might blame the media buyer. My theory is that the guidelines for the brand on the left were cooked up south of the border, and then applied rigorously in a market where a strong local brand presence had already been using the same layout and font for years. The rest is a foregone conclusion. It was practically fate that these two billboards would meet sooner or later.

That’s not to say we couldn’t pick at the execution if we were being churlish. Yeah, that Sensodyne billboard reads like a brief, but that’s pharma for you, for the most part, particularly in a medium where you have fewer than 10 words to get your point across. And I’m sure it’s not the first (or best) headline the creative team came up with. I also imagine this conversation happening somewhere between the creative presentation and final sign-off:

CLIENT: It has to be clear that the person making the statement is an expert. Ideally a dentist.
CREATIVE TEAM: Well, he is wearing a white coat and talking about toothpaste.
CLIENT: I don’t think it’s obvious enough. He could be an OB/GYN. Or a veterinarian.

(If you can’t make out how that particular issue was resolved, click on the image for a closer look.)

My sympathy is not reserved solely for the Sensodyne team. I don’t think making the hippo board would have been that much more fun. The look of Telus ads hasn’t changed appreciably in over 10 years: Creature, check. White background, check. Helvetica Neue, check. Sure, you get to work with a nice clean layout and cute animals. Imagine if writing lolcats was your job! But try having the same thing for lunch every day for a couple of weeks and get back to me. Oh and I almost forgot to mention, try something else for lunch and you’re fired.

I have to thank my wife, who has a keen eye for the absurd, as well as for hippos, for pointing this rather awkward juxtaposition out to me (and photographing it). She also suggested a slight improvement to the Telus billboard, and I have obliged; results are here.

The end of the year is a time for lists, and as I am a writer it only seems natural that my list is about words. And because I am cranky, it is equally natural that my list is about words I don’t like.

To be clear, I am not fascistic about the English language; language is an organic thing that grows and changes over time, and I accept that. I have biases of course, but I will be the first to admit that many of them are subjective. They are, however, well-considered, and difficult to refute without being cursed and derided roundly. And because my intention is not only to deride but to educate, I offer suggestions here that will make your discourse at least as effective, if not more, once you have eliminated the offending words from your vocabulary.

Usability
The shame about this word being on my list is that there’s nothing wrong with it. But we in the business of creating websites and other things people can mess around with on the internets (I’m not going to say “online experiences” because that one narrowly escaped this list and may yet find its way into an addendum) have been using it for a long time now, and too many of the people we’re saying it to still have no idea what we’re talking about. Maybe a new word would help; I’m willing to try anything at this point. Suggested alternative: sense-makingness.

Tout
This word was ruined for me by a hipster creative director who used to come into my office and put his stinky Converse-clad feet up on my desk while we were talking. He is also remembered for unironically uttering the words, while attempting to high-five me, “Come on man, don’t leave me hanging.” Irritating dig-me personalities aside, this word just sounds ugly. And when you use it as a noun, the etymological connotation is of a shill or con man. Is that what you meant to say? I didn’t think so. Suggested alternatives: sell, advertise.

Amuse bouche
I’ve got nothing against dragging non-English words and phrases into your conversation or writing if they actually express something that doesn’t have a precise English equivalent. Ennui, for example, is distinct from mere boredom. The German language has a lot of unique and appropriate compounds like weltschmerz and schadenfreude that you can’t really duplicate in English. But not only does amuse bouche not describe anything that can’t be described equally well in English, it is composed of a couple of words that pretty much any Canadian student learned in grade 4 French class, and so my brain hears “amuse mouth” before it hears “appetizer.” And then my brain becomes angry. Suggested alternatives: appetizer, palate cleanser, taste.

Optics
This is a great example of people trying to use a word in order to sound clever and failing miserably. That’s pretty commonplace in the marketing industry, but the misuse of “optics” has infected the world of journalism, and I suspect PR flackery was the carrier. I don’t have any objection to this word when it appears in its natural habitat. But if you’re saying “the optics aren’t good” and you’re not talking about the kit lens that came with your entry-level DSLR camera, consider my objection lodged, and if you’re lucky it’s not lodged where I’d like it to be. Optics already means something guys, and it’s not what you’re using it for. Suggested alternatives: look, looks. As in “It looks good” or “It doesn’t look good.”

Olympic
I have little to no interest in sport but even if that wasn’t the case I don’t think you could convince me that there aren’t enough world championships already. In fact, if your sport of choice doesn’t have a means of determining who in the world is best at it outside of the Olympics, please consider the possibility that no one really cares. And speaking of not really caring, all the Olympic city selection scandals, bribed judges, boycotts, doping, and sponsorship saturation have pretty much obliterated any recollection of this tradition’s noble and historic origins. Suggested alternatives: None. Do us all a favour and pack it in. Special Olympics get a special dispensation, of course.

Additional suggestions are welcome in the comments.

Heist (2001) is a daunting subject for analysis, as is its writer and director David Mamet. It is an example of what I call “semantic screenwriting,” in that it demonstrates that you can put pretty much any nonsensical line into Gene Hackman’s mouth and tell him to spit it back out as if it is the cleverest thing anyone in the room has heard all day, and people will likely assume that it is in fact a juicy bon mot that they just didn’t get.

This kind of writing makes for very pithy quotes, but take it from someone whose favourite pastime is coming up with his own pithy things to say and then saying them to real live people. My experience in this regard, in particular my familiarity with l’esprit de l’escalier, means that the disbelief I must suspend while watching Mamet is doubly heavy. Firstly, no one talks like that, at least not in real time. Secondly, if people did talk like that, the people they were talking to wouldn’t just nod appreciatively. They’d say, “What are you talking about? That makes no sense.”

That the movie works on this semantic level says a lot about Hackman’s talent (and to a lesser degree that of his co-stars Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito and perennial Mamet favourite and sometime magician Ricky Jay) and Mamet’s audacity, but little else. And it has been a while since I saw the movie, but I recall Mamet also devotes a lot of screen time to characters discussing how hot the Hackman character’s wife is, and if you know as I think most of us do that the actor playing that part is Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon, those frequent departures tend to grate on the ear after a while. The fact that Pidgeon’s wooden acting makes your average cigar store Indian look like Alan Arkin doesn’t help matters either.

There is however one real gem in there among the head-scratching non sequiturs – e.g. “Everyone wants money… that’s why they call it money” and “My man is so cool, sheep count him” – and I think it must give fiction writers pause, wondering whether Mamet is offering us a glimpse into his own thought processes. Hackman’s character, Joe, is refuting the D.A.’s assessment of him as a “pretty smart fella.”

JOE: Ah, not that smart.
D.A.: If you’re not that smart, how’d you figure it out?
JOE: I tried to imagine a fella smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, “what would he do?”*

My only support for this argument is that I never gave it so much thought as when I began writing fiction myself, and had to come up with the name of a character whose parents are wildly intelligent and creative people (I have yet to come up with one). The problem will worsen when it comes time to put words in all their mouths. I’ll be in Joe’s position, trying to think of what people who are smarter than I would do.

While I’m at it, I’ll try to think of what kind of things people with really interesting lives might get up to, and what kind of things happen to people who experience awe-inspiring, life-altering events.

Wish me luck.

*This is very reminiscent of another famous Mamet tautology. I have yet to track down an interview in which this exchange actually occurs, but in his book Writing in Restaurants he claims, “People always ask me where I get my ideas. I always tell them that I think of them.”

In the infinite immutable wisdom of millenia upon millenia the human body decided that an appropriate response to hostile viral takeover is to clog all available breathing passages with goo. It’s a good thing buildings don’t evolve, because if they did whenever there was a fire they’d automatically lock all the exits and cut the power. Happy birthday and thanks for nothing Darwin, you bearded freak.

Mike Silverman, a.k.a. That 1 Guy, croaked, slapped, stomped, bowed, looped, laughed and howled his way through a bafflingly under-attended set at the Rivoli last night. Accompanying himself on the Magic Pipe – an electrified 2-string proto-bass cyborg made of articulated piping, sample and loop triggers and a valve that spews smoke when things get really exciting – as well as musical saw and talking boot, T1G treated the somewhat subdued audience to his unique outsider-funk stream-of-consciousness poetry, opening with some remarkably contrabass-like arco work that exploded into the Beefheart/Zappa/Waitsenescent “Weasel Pot Pie”, and continuing on a raucous foot-stomping journey through favourites from his CDs Songs in the Key of Beotch and The Moon is Disgusting and closing with his iconic breakout single “One.” Aside from his obvious rhythmic, musical and lyrical talents, T1G manages to merge digital with electro-acoustic without letting anyone get hung up on the technology. While many contemporary performers wrap themselves in their own loops as if weaving incantations, Silverman’s show is a more organic construction – one tends to focus more on his wide-eyed expressions and the blur of his hands while the arrangements seem to build of their own accord, eventually engulfing the tunes unexpectedly as if in an aural backdraft. It’s a sure sign of a soul-deadening recession or a truly random universe (maybe both) when a show this polished and energetic doesn’t even garner an encore. But a remarkably polite and grateful post-show T1G signed CDs with a toothy grin, already planning to return later this summer.

got comped to the artist’s gala opening of the new AGO tonight. a+++ would visit again. you’re probably not supposed to take pictures of the art.