Welcome to my attempt to keep a weblog,
a running sort-of diary on my own web page.
There is a tendency to put lots of details of our lives
on social media like Facebook or Twitter.
I feel there are details of my life of some interet
to my community of followers
that aren't up to the level of posting on Facebook.
So here it is.
My idea is to have one of these for each year
now and going forward,
but there were a couple of fun items from
2022 November and 2022 December
that I feel belong here.
Link to the most-recent entry at the bottom.
Anyhow, let's see how it goes.
My most-recent choral performance was
the Vienna Boys Choir
at the Scottsdale Center of the Performing Arts
on 2022 November 15.
Twenty-one pre-pubescent male voices blended magnificently
into a heavenly, harmonious whole
for both classical and more-popular selections.
The quality of his performance suggests
he spends a lot of his non-performing time
practicing his piano playing.
If you're ever in Vienna, then they're worth a listen.
But one thing caught my attention.
Here was a group of twenty-one boys,
many of whom looked like teenagers,
maybe fourteen or fifteen years old.
All had pristine high voices,
presumably the same pristine high voices
for the entire ten-week tour.
I don't know a lot of ways to keep
twenty-one boys' voices from changing
through puberty,
in fact I can only think of one.
Back in the not-so-good old days
choral works had the beauty of a castrato section.
I'm told they don't do that anymore,
I hope not to these boys.
Maybe there's another way to preserve
the beauty of these twenty-one voices
as I heard them.
So here I open my mailbox and there's a key.
The letter A, B, or C is long worn off,
so I try the key in all three boxes with some
vigorous wiggling and more-vigorous complaining.
None of these open very well,
so no treasure for me.
At least it's not summer where I don't want my new vinyl record
melting in the afternoon Scottsdale heat,
often 45°C (115°F).
So I decide to take the key to the post office.
If I'm going to complain, then at least somebody appropriate
should listen to me.
Holiday season means I had to wait for a parking space
and then in a long line with the key dangling from my fingers
as I was fuming.
Finally the quick-service fellow for faster things
like stamp purchases sees me without a package
and invites me over.
I show him the bare key without any indication of which box it's for
and describe my frustration.
When I ask for another key to the same big box
he tells me he doesn't have those keys.
"Well who does have them?" I ask
and I'm told they're in some compartment
with the mailboxes themselves
but tomorrow's delivery will resolve my problem.
I have a picture of the carrier
(who already doesn't like me very much
'cuz I grumbled when he bent one of my records
stuffing it into the small box)
grudgingly marching my package to my doorstep
where he might hope I would be the victim of porch pirates.
(I'll point out that my cul-de-sac has never
been the victm of that sort of theft,
to my knowledge).
Instead my mailbox was the short-term home of another key,
also worn beyond recognition,
but this key actually worked in one of the boxes
and I got my package.
So they managed to solve my immediate problem
without doing anything to reduce the likelihood
of such a problem recurring.
Even the infamous post office
is usually better than that.
I also keep an old 22-inch K&E slide rule,
way above my pay grade when we were still using slide rules,
more for sentiment than practicality.
I have my grandmother's dishes in one trophy case
next to her trinkets and
my great-grandmother's dishes in another trophy case.
I have my father's office calendar and my mother's napkin holder.
I love my old stuff.
Unlike one of my older friends Bill
I'm not a luddite.
I love the new technology alongside the old.
I have high-speed Internet and local network
so I can watch movies and television shows
and I use that network to play the FLAC files
(Free Lossless Audio Codec) "ripped" from my
compact disks (CDs).
There are laptop computers in every room of my house
(except bathrooms),
I work from home using Internet terminal sessions
and Microsoft Teams to communicate,
and I rely on my home network to manage
photographs
when I
travel.
I have lots of gadgets.
All of my bathrooms have motion-detector toilet lights
so I don't have to turn on the light at night
and motion-detector fans for air circulation.
Amazon Alexa controls my thermostats
so I can turn on more heat or air conditioning downstairs
while I'm getting out of bed upstairs.
It was -30°C (-20°F) and windy at night,
I was driving home and tired,
and there were two women on the side of the road
alone with a flat tire.
So I pulled over and changed their tire
with a steady patter explaining what I was doing
so maybe next time they would have a fighting chance.
Maybe I got home twenty minutes later,
but these two might not have gotten home at all,
so it's a win all around.
Maybe something good happened to me later by karma,
but I know I felt better that night.
I remember a friend whose car wouldn't start
New Year's Eve in a parking lot at Kennedy Airport
and he recalled how cheerful and upbeat the fellow was
when he came to start my friend's car.
Was he happy to be working in the cold on New Year's Eve?
Probably not, but apparently he felt he could spread
some holiday cheer in a situation not generally cheerful.
After a few hours of flight delays
I finally got to my car at The Parking Spot in Phoenix
and the van driver Roger commented that he liked my new car.
I had to ask, he sees thousands upon thousands of cars,
why would he remember mine?
He said he remembers me because I'm so upbeat.
Late and tired I wasn't feeling all that upbeat,
so I asked him about it.
He said, "Your flight was delayed,
there are no flights at one-thirty in the morning,
and you're still cheerful."
I said that six hours from Philly may have turned
into nine hours, but it still beats walking.
"Well, some people don't have that attitude."
I was at Hearing Life in Scottsdale,
my $8000 Oticon hearing aids were "on the fritz"
and I was grateful they could squeeze me in to fix them.
Another customer was giving them the third degree
howcum I spent $6000 on hearing aids
and they don't work.
I looked at the beleaguered and besieged clerk
and said I'm able to hear what people are saying
and to appreciate the beauty of music at a high level
364 days a year, one day I don't get that benefit,
and that sounds like a win to me.
She said some people don't see it that way.
There is some rational reason to believe in
the platitudes about positive attitude.
First, being nice to people makes them happier
and more likely to be nice in return.
Second, our world is small enough that being overtly helpful
may be remembered by somebody in a situation where we need help.
Sometimes I ask myself what I did to deserve
having good people and good things in my life,
but maybe I did do something to make some of that happen.
You know how it is.
I dread having people ask me to pick something up at Starbucks.
Is it latte or double-latte or mocha with cream and/or sugar
and, if so, what kind of cream is it and is it
white sugar or brown sugar?
Oh, yes, don't forget, small, medium, large, or extra large?
No matter how carefully my friend specifies the order
I know I'm going to be asked at least one more question
where I have to call my friend and ask
for more information about the coffee order.
Our lives have become an ever-increasing whirlwind
of selections upon selections, more and more overchoice.
The book came in a choice of twelve colors.
I take great pleasure in listening to music in my life.
Being most human myself
I take pleasure in the sound of a human voice or,
even more wonderful,
an entire chorus of human voices.
(That I'm not a big opera fan
I attribute to my already-full concert schedule
and my even-greater appreciation of ballet.
I recently went to a product of "Carmen"
that was to die for,
the music was terrific, the singing was terrific,
and it was physically passionate to the point of pornography,
as the story is supposed to be.)
As my natural hearing is no longer what it was,
my latest-technology Oticon hearing aids are a joy to me.
They allow me to resolve audible differences
in music and hifi.
As an audiophile weenie they enable me to make sound comparisons,
for example between amplifiers and the line-cords to the mains power.
I have no trouble aligning
a (vinyl) phonograph cartridge by ear.
Up until this concert
the default Music setting on these hearing aids
has been uniformly delightful in the concert hall
and this is the first time I had trouble.
There was an overloading, distorting effect
in my hearing aids that was mitigated
by turning their volume down.
Once I lowered the sound level of the hearing aids they were fine,
but it was amusing to hear something
with so much higher frequency content
of so much complexity
that they were overwhelmed.
My house was built circa 1975
and I figure our mailboxes are from the same era.
Like our houses it appears these mailboxes
were not built to endure.
In particular, the keys to the three large boxes
don't work very well.
It takes several minutes of frustrating wiggling
to get the big box open so I can get the treasure inside,
often a vinyl phonograph record.
I love my old stuff, especially my hifi.
My recently-departed friend Mel Schilling
sold
me his old loudspeakers in 1985
and I figure he listened to them for twenty years before that.
My turntable was new in 1979,
I manufactured the tonearm in 1980,
and the cartridge is from 1969.
The electronics are early-to-mid 1980s vintage.
My records and tapes are joy to me.
We're inundated with annoying exhortations to be upbeat and happy,
you know the bit about positive outlook bringing positive results.
It's kind of like the karma bullshit,
that doing good here and now makes something good
more likely to happen somewhere else later.
The thing is I find myself believing in it
and I find it works for me.
I like living in a world where people feel
they ought to do good works,
but there are reasons why it should be that,
"what goes around comes around,"
and more good things happen to happier people.
When I was in high school in 1972 taking a course in
Sociology
we read a book by Alvin Toffler called
Future Shock.
Mr. Toffler made three assertions I recall.
First, facing the future would be as great a source of stress
as running into a more-advanced civilization,
so his analogy to culture shock was that we would
have to deal with future shock.
Second, one of the two major stress points
was not only change but the rate of change
would increase to the point of being a source of personal pain.
Third, that we would be inundated with choice,
pointless choice, gratuitous choice,
choice overload, cognitive impairment that he called
"overchoice."
Over the latter part of 2022
I began to have pain in my left knee.
My usual summer-morning workout is
a twenty-mile (32 Km) bicycle ride
with a two-kilometer (1.2-mile) run in the middle,
but the limited morning light squeezes out the run part
and my sensitive knee, therefore, isn't a problem in my mornings.
Even though I had some sore-knee mornings
I was still able to hike six or even eight miles.
The moments of pain come suddenly,
like there are two surfaces a hair's width apart
and when they touch it hurts,
so I had some concerns doing longer hikes
with the possibility of limping home in pain,
but the pain wasn't that bad when it did hurt while walking.
Besides being my doctor coming up on twenty years, Dr. Hinchman is also an athlete himself. I saw him 2022 December 28, he listened patiently to his patient's story and send me for an MRI exam. (I'm old enough to remember when the technology was called "nuclear magnetic resonance" (NMR), but people were afraid of anything "nuclear" and now it's magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) instead.) I went to Scottsdale Medical Imaging Lab (SMIL) on 2023 January 7 and got a technical-sounding report that summarizes to something like, "The patient may be a whining crybaby about his sore knee but there's really stuff wrong in there." My medial meniscus has an inner margin tear of the posterior horn, so there is real damage.
Dr. Hinchman called me and chatted about the report. There is a long and laborious route of physical therapy and healing or maybe there is a surgical route to remove the torn tissue like I did last time with my right knee. He thinks we're a long way from me needing a knee replacement and I'm glad to hear that. I was more than happy with my experience six years ago with Dr. Russo and he is still in business. He is a surgeon and his first response may lean towards surgery, but that's also the way I'm feeling right now. If there's something ripped apart or torn asunder, then a local surgical repair may be the answer. I made an appointment to see Dr. Russo 2023 January 25, Wednesday.
After weeks of gentle coddling my knee doesn't hurt at all. That gives me license to do whatever I want. I could do jumping jacks or running in place. I decided I want to continue to walk gently and to use hand-support "furniture cruising" when possible, no hiking or running, and sticking to bicycling and upper-body weight lifting for exercise.
Dr. Russo looked at old x-rays and new MRI scans, poked at my knee, and said waiting for it to heal was my best option. The only part that hurts is the lower-outer "lateral" part of my knee and the only visible or repairable damage is on the inner "medial" part of my knee. So I'm going to be gentle with my knee and take a little bit of Tylenol, and not Advil with my Xarelto blood thinner.
So I try to reach my fingers around the tape on my deck,
realize it's hopeless or,
worse, I'm going to drop the reel if I try,
put down whatever I'm holding in the other hand,
and pick up the reel with both hands to put it
back in the box for another day.
Maybe, for inspiration,
I should have a picture of Wilt Chamberlain
holding a reel that looks like a drink coaster in his hand.
(He probably could palm a
ten-inch
reel or even a twelve-inch long-play (LP) vinyl record.)
When he mentioned
Artur Rubinstein
something dawned on me.
I'm a practicing mathematician,
I call myself an
"Industrial Mathematician,
my advanced degree is in a field called Operations Research,
and I've been to several conferences over the years
where people in the field gather
for professional talks and conversation.
I have met many of the famous people in my profession.
If I were an academic instead of a practitioner
I would have significantly more social intercourse
in my professional circles.
My friend
Forman Acton
knew just about every famous mathematician and physicist
in the mid-Twentieth Century.
Jeffrey Siegel was alone on the stage
and I believe not one famous classical-music pianist
was in the audience.
His concert season is busy.
A few years ago it was twenty-two venues
doing four Keyboard-Conversations concerts
for a total of eighty-eight, one for each key on the piano.
I joked that if he played a Bosendorfer piano
with ninety-two keys
he would have to do a twenty-third venue.
I doubt he has much time to attend concerts
performed by his contemporary piano performers.
He says he maintained friendships with other concert pianists
and I believe he does,
but it is an effort he would have to make
more than I have to do.
I'm glad for him that he's able
to stay in touch with his community
because it has been a blessing for me
to have a professional community
where we know each other and, occasionally,
see each other.
Lagging left:
One of the positive features of Scottsdale
is that left-turn, cross-traffic-flow, traffic-light-green arrows
come after the straight-ahead green light.
This is good for drivers because it keeps more traffic going straight.
This is good for bicycles because it clears out the right-turn lane
before the light turns green.
This is good for pedestrians because the last traffic
going across is confined to just the left-turn lanes.
Well, Scottsdale decided to do something about it.
They found something worse than switching all the intersections.
Instead they changed just some of them
so we don't know which way the lights are going to go next.
Late turn signals:
There is something more annoying than drivers
not using their blinkers, or "signaling straight" as I put it.
There is something more annoying,
waiting until the turn is already in progress
and flipping on the blinker as if to say,
"Yes, I know we're supposed to use blinkers,
but I can be more annoying this way."
A new generation of idiocy has drivers "wolfpacking,"
as one friends calls it,
going out of their way to hang with other drivers.
I've made as many as four speed changes only to have
a tag-along-in-my-blind-spot driver stay with me.
I think it's important to keep ballet faithful to itself.
I attend a lot of dance performances that are not ballet,
Alvin Ailey,
Aljibe Tango (Argentina),
Aspen Sante Fe Ballet,
Bodytraffic,
Carraria Agwa,
Merce Cunningham,
Diavolo,
Dorrance,
Forever Tango,
Limón,
Momix,
Dave Parsons,
Polobolus,
Paul Taylor,
Royal Cambodian Ballet,
Samhära (India),
and a few others whose programs I can't find at the moment.
With a few exceptions I have enjoyed these thoroughly.
As these are not ballet companies,
even if one or two of them have "Ballet" in their titles,
I don't insist their dance be true to the art of ballet.
On the other hand, in my own humble opinion,
a big-city ballet company program should be
faithful to ballet.
I've had people say maybe I should be more open minded.
I should think outside the box.
I had a cat who would think outside the box
and I had to clean it up each morning,
so much for thinking outside the box.
Sure, if Philadelphia Ballet wants to perform
stuff that clearly isn't ballet,
then that's their privilege,
but I would personally prefer more ballet in the ballet
than the last two pieces in this program.
The first work, "PS," was exactly what I came for,
all ballet, aggressively new,
definitely not George Balanchine
without being obviously, deliberately different.
It had ballet's turns and pirouettes with
ballerinas on pointe,
fewer leaps than most ballet but plenty of pizzazz.
This is what I like in a "Forward-Motion" ballet program.
Other than a few turns on pointe,
the others struck me as not enough ballet
for what I came for.
"ENdure" was too much just walking around for my taste
in loose, full-body red and maroon outfits
while "Circumstellars" was a terrific, high-energy piece
of modern dance, wowie-zowie, lots of fun.
The athleticism of the company was well suited for this
and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
This was a work a modern dance company would be
totally proud to perform.
I felt a little awkward seeing it from a big-city ballet company.
I got the impression that members of
the Boeing design department
didn't fly as passengers on this airplane.
Other American-Airlines flights I've been on
have made the overhead bins deep enough
for rollerboards to go lengthwise to make more room
while these didn't,
so my second bag went on the footrest so the seat could extend.
It took a few flight attendents leaning over me
to find the earphone jack right at my hip under all the controls.
The seat control was camouflaged to look like a cell phone
and it only worked after some strange combination of multiple taps.
There was a pull-cable remote control device which had
the light and call buttons close together and similar looking,
"No, ma'am, I wasn't calling, sorry about that."
It wasn't as coordinated with the entertainment screen
as I would have liked.
Somebody designed a seriously-comfortable seat
in a really nice airplane and
somebody was supposed to make the controls easy
for tired travelers to figure out.
I know I've been out of touch,
but the only movies I could find that I've seen before
were "Casablanca" and "50 First Dates."
When I flipped the selection to "Science Fiction"
it was almost all Spiderman and other Marvel movies.
It looked like there were a dozen Spiderman movies.
I figured Star Wars and Star Trek movies would make it in there.
I generally don't watch new movies because they get interrupted
by silly things like landing at my destination.
I did notice when I stopped the movie
it didn't seem to like keeping my place in that movie
and coming back to it apparently was not an option.
Just to make my experience a little more surreal,
I was offered a wheelchair because my knee was in serious pain
and I gladly accepted it.
True to their word,
when I hobbled off the 'plane I got put in a wheelchair
with my luggage attached.
The staff ran off to do something else and,
after half an hour,
I got my luggage and started the long limp to the exit.
There were no large wheels for me to roll myself where I was going.
Maybe in that half hour, maybe earlier,
the direct route from the Phoenix-Terminal-Four-B gates
to the Parking-Spot van pickup was closed
and I had to make my way around to the A gates
to go downstairs and back again.
Alan King had a routine on insurance where the lady said,
"My, my, you should have gotten fire or theft,"
as his current fire-and-theft covered him only if
the house was robbed while it was burning down.
Next time I'll ask for a wheelchair with somebody to push it.
Look, my experience wasn't terrible, I got where I was going
in a comfortable seat with a meal and plenty of sleep and
the wheelchair-wait delay wasn't that long.
Getting from Philly to Phoenix in six or seven hours
sure beats walking, that's for sure.
But there are some human-factors things
that could have gone better and
I believe were intended to go better.
Well, I'm going to look at some of the bigger pictures of,
"What did I do to deserve this?"
My life has been full of wonderful
shows of
music, dance, and theater,
more recently than ever before.
Many of our admired great performers
are still performing in their later years,
much to the joy of me and my concert friends.
There is a sense of urgency in that these people will
not be playing too much longer,
from retirement or infirmity or worse,
and they're still wonderful today.
Maybe I missed the glory years of
Stokowski, Toscinini, Artur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz,
and Jascha Heifitz,
but I think of those I've heard in my four decades
of active concert attendance.
To pick one of my favorites, Emanuel Ax isn't getting any younger
and I got to hear him play this month.
I don't go to many operas only because I already have
more than seventy concerts per year on my calendar.
(My friend Warren and I cover the field
with him being active in the opera donor community
and me being active in the ballet
and we both contribute to the symphony.)
What a gift from the gods, or at least the muses,
to have these performance events in our lives.
To answer my original question, the answer is
no, I don't know what I did to deserve something this wonderful.
The first is renting a car from Xpress,
a small company in Kanab, Utah, to drive
to Zion National Park.
It was 2022 October 1-3, Saturday through Monday.
I've rented from them several times in the past,
most recently 2022 September 3-5 to drive
the same car to Bryce Canyon.
I got the usual warning not to drive the car on dirt roads,
so when my friend and I reached the end of the paved road
on one of our exploratory voyages, we turned back.
Two weeks after I returned the car I got a call
that my driving on dirt roads (that I didn't do)
did $3500 of damage to their car
and they had photographs of damage on the bottom of the car.
There was no evidence that that damage was caused by me
or even that those pictures were taken after I rented the car.
They didn't talk with me as promised,
they just put $3500 on my MasterCard.
When I went to MasterCard, they did their "investigation"
only to conclude that the rental company Xpress
really thought they were right.
I suggested a rental car company in this century,
especially one concerned where the car is being driven,
would have a GPS in the car.
I asked what dirt road they think I drove on
so I could figure out what they were thinking I did.
If I hired a lawyer in Kanab to sue them,
then how would I get to their law office
as Xpress is the only car rental in Kanab.
I would have to fly to Page and drive 100 miles.
So I decided to call my car insurance company,
State Farm, and to file an damage claim
with the understanding that they were to ascertain
for themselves that some damage actually took place.
I figured I would sick State Farm's lawyers on Xpress.
More recently I went on a trip 2023 April 15-27
to Western Australia and
the North Island of New Zealand.
I booked my flights from Phoenix (PHX) to Perth (PER)
in 2022 November through a web-page outfit called HOP2
for $4500.
They seemed reasonable enough with an itinerary
through Los Angeles (LAX), Tokyo-Narita (NRT),
and Singapore (SIN).
I should have been worried right out the the box
when I saw the itinerary.
When I got to LAX I found I had no ticket on Singapore Airlines.
I was sitting in an airport lounge with no booking anywhere.
Before I found that out, I started getting text messages from HOP2
with alternative, day-later itineraries.
Why would I want that?
They told me my flight was cancelled.
I checked with Singapore Airlines when their agent showed up
and there were no canceled flights, just that I wasn't booked.
They directed me to their web page where I could buy the ticket
I paid $4500 for last November.
At the airport, and at the last minute, the price was now $12500.
The folks at HOP2 kept texting me saying I was booked
and they gave me a six-character confirmation code
that Singapore Airlines had no record of,
nor did they have a booking in my name.
At this point, rather than wait for them to get me to Perth days later,
I found a good flight on QANTAS at a lower grade of service
called Premium Economy for $9000 and I bought that tickets instead
of paying $12500 for full Business Class on Singapore Airlines.
Of course I'm owed a full refund from HOP2,
but I feel I'm owed the full value $12500 of the product I paid for.
There was no cancellation, no failure, nothing wrong
except they "forgot" to book my flights.
Those flights flew with empty seats I could have occupied
for $12500, so we have an actual
2023 April 15 dollar value
for the seats I paid for in 2022 November.
I can feel sorry for the poor lady in Maldova
who spent her Easter Sunday trying to unravel the mess,
but I feel HOP2 should refund me $12500 and be done with it.
Sometimes the stars align.
I like Diana Krall, her voice, her music, her spirit.
I like Diana Krall enough to buy a ticket to her concert.
The songs were terrific and the jazz was great
with great solos amid the spirited vocals.
Still, my greatest take-away from this evening
was the audience.
I'm usually happy if the audience isn't a negative,
I'm happy to have no conversations,
nobody pushing me, nobody blocking my view.
(Actually, there was a tall person in front of me
and I had to lean sideways, but that didn't keep me
from enjoying the evening.)
This time the audience was a huge positive.
They were clearly "into" the performance,
no conversations or other annoying distractions
and applauding appropriately at each jazz solo
and ethusiastically at the ends of pieces.
They amplified my pleasure.
"Who could ask for anything more?"
Soon came and went, but a few weeks after that
Tyler visited me and my record collection and then
we met to fly into a backcountry airstrip
called Pleasant Valley (24AZ) on the chart and
called "Young International" in my circle of flying friends.
It's in the Arizona town of Young,
about thirty miles east of Payson.
This was Tyler's first time landing on an unpaved airstrip,
graded dirt in this case, very nice.
I did a landing I could be proud of and we taxied
to the picnic area midfield.
It was a beautiful day in Young, Arizona,
the sky was azure blue with a few clouds,
winds were light, and the temperature was comfortable.
What we didn't expect was a fellow, Vern, waiting there.
He was waiting for Tommy who had some kind of mechanical problem
and we arrived at the same time Vern expected Tommy.
After waiting a while for Tommy,
no cell coverage in these more-remote places,
Vern suggested we go into the town of Young for breakfast,
which was delicious,
and we had a delightful conversation
after which Tyler and I had a delightful flight
back home to Falcon Field (FFZ) in Mesa, Arizona.
(I guess we didn't get to Payson (PAN) for breakfast.
This was a lot better.
I'll take good luck over planning any day.)
I was around thirty years old when I worked at a place
that required backing our cars into company parking spaces.
It was obviously better, safer, and more efficient.
I still usually back out of angle-parking spaces,
but anything even remotely like a straight in parking space
I know better than to back out of it.
So here I am in a parking lot after enjoying breakfast with friends
and one driver is moving out of the lot
while the other backs out,
not gently and slowly,
but fast and hard.
I guess he figures the faster he goes
the less time he's out there exposed to the risk of collision.
That logic may be lost on me
(I'm a math Ph.D., what would I know?)
but maybe it worked well for him most of the time.
So today these two cars hit each other with an audible crunch
while I standing there.
I so wanted to say to the forward-moving driver
that he should insist the other guy pay for his repairs
and his time to take care of them
and I would be happy to testify that no insurance should pay
as the decision to back out of the space,
especially without looking, was not an accident.
In 2020 March I dug out all my old live-music
cassette tapes from the same period and digitized them
for posterity using
a twenty-dollar V.TOP analogue-to-digital device
about which I have no complaints.
The sound is clean and correct and I thought well of it at the time.
More recent comparisons with significantly-higher-end equipment
only increases my respect for what the V.TOP designers achieved.
Let me take a moment to reflect on these recordings.
My friend Jonathan at International Phonograph Inc. (IPI)
in Chicago sells tape copies of live music to die for,
Stan Getz, Ravi Shankar,
Benny Goodman, Chick Corea,
et cetera.
He lives in a rarified world of the best recordings
of the best people recorded and played on the best equipment.
While my live-recording history is significantly more modest,
I feel I have earned a seat at his table,
if only to sit at the corner where I have to lean over
to reach my plate.
I sympathize with
Corey Greenberg
that I'm a far better audiophile weenie
having made my own live recordings.
Mel Schilling sold me a pair of Nakamichi CM700 microphones
which I have used in their cartioid configuration
and placed half a meter apart facing out at a 90° angle.
I have a two-minute
sample
recorded 1980 February 13
at The Bucket in Palo Alto
for the reader's perusal.
This recording was made using a 1979-vintage
Sony TC-D5
with an old, ordinary Maxell UD-90 cassette,
no chrome, no metal, and no Dolby noise reduction.
It's clearly limited compared to a reel-to-reel recording
or even a good phonograph record,
but it has that live-music feel,
"the magic of the moment,"
and it has a fantastic stereo image.
So here I am with forty tape from forty years ago
(maybe thirty-nine tapes from forty-two years ago,
close enough for jazz)
and many of them are Ampex 456 Grandmaster tapes that got
the dreaded Sticky-Tape Syndrome where,
so I'm told, the water supply at the new Ampex factory
was different enough that the newer, post-1970 tapes
would turn into sticky goo over a couple of decades.
The cure, they tell me, is baking the tape for several hours
so I get one play
(or maybe a few plays over a few hours)
which would be best used to copy the tape.
Planning to do that with my older Ampex 456 tapes
it seemed reasonable to make digital copies as well
at higher resolution with higher sound quality
than was available to me twenty years ago.
Jonathan recommended Chris at Sweetwater Sound who recommended the
Sound Devices
USBPre 2 for about USD $1100 to my door.
I pulled out my IPI tape
from 1980 July 2 of Ravi Shankar
and make several digital recordings of it.
Depth here is bits per sample and
rate is thousands of samples per second.
My young aspiring-audiophile friend Tyler joined me
as we compared A-C, C-D, and D-f.
Each comparison had more clarity and texture,
better imaging, more dramatic impact,
just "more there there" as at least one audio guy has put it.
I attributed the A-C improvement mostly to better equipment,
the C-D improvement to the depth increase from 16 to 24, and
the D-F improvement to two fewer conversions direct from the tape.
The C-D was profound as the extra bits offer a lot of
extra resolution.
My real-engineer RADAR-geek friend Jeff doubts the 24-bit mode
is really linear to one part in 224=16777216,
but if it has an honest twenty bits, that's
one part in 220=1048576,
sixteen times more "inner detail"
(as one audio rag called it)
then the 16-bit compact disk standard.
One thing cool to me is that I'm still able to hear
these differences at this critical level
of audiophile discrimination
even through my Oticon hearings aids to my age-addled ears.
(That's another reason I was so happy
Tyler could join me.)
There's something cool still being able
to listen at this level of acuity.
I'm not pooh-pooh-ing the compact disk sound as garbage,
even if it isn't as good as my records and my factory tapes.
But, for right now, we're living and listening
in a live-music-to-tape world
where the standards are far higher than
compact disks, vinyl records, or factory tapes,
even the two-track "inline" tapes made prior to 1960.
I'll be delighted to have digital copies of my tapes
made on the Sound Devices USBPre 2.
I remember how cool it was that the professional-league
National Basketball Association (NBA) players
can "palm" a basketball, pick it up with one hand and hold it.
When I want to take a reel off my tape deck
with something in my other hand,
I feel pathetic that I can't even palm a seven-inch reel of tape.
It's kind of like when I see professioal dancers
fly through the air making it look so easy
and then I go for a run and I have to plan my steps ahead
so I don't trip over a curbstone.
They
say
pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff
could reach
thirteen notes
while most of us more-mortal mortals
are happy when we can reach nine notes, one more than an octave.
I have a whirlwind of concerts,
last night, tomorrow night, and the next four nights after that.
Last night was at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts,
Jeffrey Siegel, pianist, doing his "Keyboard Conversations"
where he talks about each piece before playing it.
After five-plus decades doing this he is still on his game
and it was both educationallly and musically a wonderful evening.
Driving and drivers are long-term topics
of complaining conversation.
Here are a few items that I grumble about more recently.
Last night was a wonderful performance
by the Philadelphia Ballet called "Forward Motion."
While it's important for ballet to keep its roots intact
with performances of "Swan Lake," "Sleeping Beauty," and,
of course, "The Nutcracker,"
it is also important to keep innovating with new choreography,
to extend the frontier of ballet as an art form.
I had a chance to fly First Class on a new Boeing 787 "Dreamliner"
from Phoenix (PHX) to Philadelphia (PHL) and back.
It was a terrific airplane with the cubbyhole pod seats, very nice.
I'm old enough to remember when they announced
the Boeing 747 "Whale" and I have an older friend
(recently departed) who worked on them
in Northwest-Airplanes Technical-Operations maintenance department
back in 1970 when they first flew.
The B787 has big windows for enjoying the view.
I like the one-two-one rows so everybody gets an aisle seat,
a big win
where the window guy doesn't annoy the aisle guy to get out.
for those middle-night piddle trips.
Once in a while I do something stupid,
maybe drop a dish and the shards are a pain to clean up
or I stub my toe or hit my knee.
I cuss for a few minutes and the tirade always ends with,
"What did I do to deserve this?"
Lately my knee has been giving me a lot of grief
and I'm at the age where not hiking or even walking unaided again
is a distinct possibility,
the consequence of living well as a runner for four decades.
I try not to whine every time I get the short end of the stick,
but two events have left me thousands of dollars short
and I feel other people might learn from my mistakes or misfortunes.
a tight conntection of −95 minutes (back in time)
PHX-to-LAX 7:20 to 8:54, Saturday morning, the same flight
long flights on Singapore airlines in Business Class
I contacted them through email after failing to connect
on email or web page and they removed the time-travel part
and the second trip on the same flight
and they confirmed the entire itinerary.
It was the Mesa Arts Center, it was Diana Krall,
it was a great band, it was a wonderful audience
that applauded vigorously at the ends of the songs
and politely after each solo,
it was a concert without a bunch of conversations going on,
it was the perfect concert.
A couple of months ago my buddy Zeke and I
met by airplane at Payson Airport (PAN) for breakfast
and there was an airplane on the ramp with a flat tire.
Being good people, at least good enough
to do a two-minute good deed,
we helped these guys push the airplane into
a maintenance hangar for repair.
While the repair was being done
I struck a conversation with the young pilot, Tyler.
We decided we would meet again soon.
Do you know how hard it is to be quiet when I want to yell
"I TOLD YOU SO"
at the top of my lungs?
I'm planning to restore my old recordings from 1980 and 1981
(many of which have succumbed to "sticky-tape" syndrome)
and to archive them in higher-quality digital files.
Sometime around twenty years ago I "burned" them all
onto compact disks (CDs) using a wonderful
HHB BurnIt device
and, more recently in 2019 January,
I "ripped" those CDs onto FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
that I have enjoyed for the last few years.
Depth/Rate
A ipi-1980-07-02-ravi-shankar-vtop.wav
16/44
B ipi-1980-07-02-ravi-shankar-sd-16-48.wav
16/48
C ipi-1980-07-02-ravi-shankar-sd-16-96.wav
16/96
D ipi-1980-07-02-ravi-shankar-sd-24-96.wav
24/96
E ipi-1980-07-02-ravi-shankar-sd-32-96.wav
32/96
All of these were created with Linux-Mint Audacity,
File A was done with my $20 V.TOP device,
and the rest were done with the USBPre 2.
It took some asking questions and messing around
to figure out how to make recordings with various depths and rates
and the USBPre 2 is a 24-bit device, so File E should
be no different from File D.
We'll call the live tape itself "File F"
to make comunication easier.
7:36:55 Mountain Standard Time
(MST).
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