So here’s the weird thing — as the years go by, and computing power multiplies exponentially, it actually gets harder to do the things I used to do. My little tricks and maneuvers get antiquated quickly, and I am left banging my head against a (punk) rock as modern operating systems strip out functionality that I used to rely upon.

I sit and marvel at the fact that it was easier for me to do home recording in 2002 on a pathetically weak Dell laptop with a 10GB hard drive, Windows Me (!!), 256 (!!!) MB of RAM, no CD-burner, and only a slow and unreliable dial-up internet connection. I was able to plug a decent microphone directly into the machine, fire up Audacity, record guitar, use goofy freeware software to make other noises like drum beats. Given the ultra-lo-tech environment I actually made some excellent recordings that way.

The past couple weeks I have been trying to figure out a way to replicate that experience on a new Windows 7 laptop with basically infinite disk space and memory. I also have some audio devices that I’ve accumulated over the years to interface with it. It seems like it should be about a hundred times easier than those computing dark ages of 7 or 8 years ago.

But it turns out that the computer-manufacturing world has modified modern audio drivers to block the ability to record on one program the output from another. You don’t hear much about this, it was done awfully quietly. I spent hours going through settings to figure out why I couldn’t do this simple task — for example, play a drum loop on one stupid piece of freeware and record it in Audacity. Digging through various audio forums I eventually realized that this has been deliberately blocked by a lot of manufacturers. (Does anyone know if new Macs can still do this?) Concerns about internet piracy have made them block this whole function so that you can’t, say, play something on youtube or pandora and record it (because I’m sure that was a major method of stealing music. Geesh.)

I’m pretty annoyed and embittered about this — it only affects a pretty tiny subset of computer users, but it’s not like it has been in the news, or that I could have possibly anticipated that my new computer wouldn’t be able to do this. There are dubious workarounds listed in some of the forums, relating to re-configuring and replacing audio drivers, but they seemed awfully sketchy, and the consensus seems to be that this is just the way it goes. There are possibly hardware issues involved as well.

Anyway I am writing about all this not just to vent — though it ties into my growing ambivalence about technological progress, that the future of computers is one of a world of mindless consumers paying hundreds of dollars a month for subscriptions to various services that they interact with solely through their iPads or whatever. No, I am putting forward one crazy complicated workaround that I came up with that works. If this helps anyone doing a web search for something like “capture audio output” then I will be happy to do my part to combat the omnipresent Man.

So here is what I have done. It is not the least bit elegant, but it might help some folks figure out their own workaround. I was able to get around the blocked drivers by outputting the audio signal to a series of external devices, and then re-inputting it for recording. With trial and error I figured out a way that doesn’t seem to significantly degrade the signal quality. Probably no one else in the world will have the same equipment handy, but there are probably other comparable solutions.

First step is to export the audio signal from the PC. I have an M-Audio Audiophile USB device that is able to handle audio I/O and does the trick.

Second step is to send the signal to another device. I was able to export it from the Audiophile to an old 4-track via standard audio cables. Possibly even a stereo receiver would work.

Third step is to re-import the signal. (So ridiculous!) I was able to send it from the 4-track’s monitor mix back into the Audiophile USB device.

Then you have to capture the signal in Windows. It turns out that I had to use “Microsoft Sound Mapper” as my Windows recording device to actually get it to work.

So insane. It also means that if I want to do this it takes a huge amount of set-up, and I have to adjust the volume levels of like 3 different machines and 2 pieces of software. But it can be done! If you have another work-around please let me know — and if you have experience doing semi-pro-level audio work on a new Mac I would also love to know how that works. This issue with Windows machines seems to be pretty recent, like within the past year or so.

It’s not so often that one of your musical idols commits suicide. It’s left me a little sad and contemplative, but I spent the past day or two listening to Linkous’s musical project Sparklehorse, and my sadness is balanced out by appreciation for what he left behind, a strange and lovely body of work that’s had a deep impact on me over the course of my whole adult life. Linkous’s frail work was so tinged with mortality — and he famously already died once, only to be revived — that his suicide isn’t surprising or even exactly tragic. (Though it’s tragic in the sense of Greek drama, I guess, where you know from the prophecy at the beginning that someone is going to kill her children or stab his eyes out.) I’m still deeply affected, though, and I’ve rarely felt stranger than I did walking around yesterday on the first blue-skied sunny spring-like day of the year, listening to sad Sparklehorse albums on my ipod while taking in the beauty of a world shaking off winter.

Nowadays I can’t remember what prompted me to buy the first Sparklehorse CD at a used CD store on Main Street of my hometown — I probably read about it, a review in Spin or something. This would have been around 1996, and I would have been 18 or 19 and in college. The album, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot was, well, weird. It certainly didn’t sound like the alternative rock that I might have expected from the typewriter-font album cover and band name (“Sparklehorse” doesn’t sound that different from, say, “Candlebox”). At the time, it was probably the most experimental music I’d ever really listened to, with its twisted distorted pop, sound collages, literary allusions, and elegiac tone. I liked it, and it grew on me, though of course in those days I used to listen a fair amount to every CD I owned. Nobody else I knew really got into it, but I kept returning to it from time to time.

I followed the music news (and emerging internet) enough to learn a little about Mark Linkous. He was from Virginia, from some rural area that was something of a parallel to the area of Maryland where I grew up. As I listen to Vivadixie… all these years later, the most striking moment of the whole album is an answering-machine message that plays in the background during the song “Spirit Ditch.” It’s the sound of a middle-aged woman with a notable Appalachian accent telling someone she loves (her son?) about a dream about him as a child; it’s sad and makes me wonder who’s speaking. Linkous’s mom? A friend’s mom? Someone completely unrelated?

Sparklehorse: Spirit Ditch

[See post to listen to audio]

Anyhow it reminds me of Appalachia and my own roots. I went a different direction from Mark Linkous — where I turned into a snobby urbanite, he seemed to retreat even further away from modern civilization. I spent my 20s walking city sidewalks and haunting loud rock clubs instead of going the moonshine-and-piano route that still sat in the back of my mind. But I remained interested in Sparklehorse.

I didn’t pick up the second Sparklehorse album when it came out, though I was interested, having read all about Mark Linkous’s death-and-resurrection experience. I did pick up a free promo videotape at some record store that had videos for 4 or 5 of the songs on Good Morning Spider, including “Sick of Goodbyes” which startled me (I had never read my Cracker liner notes carefully enough to notice that Linkous co-wrote the song with David Lowery).

So I didn’t listen to much Sparklehorse for several years, until the third album, It’s a Wonderful Life, came out in 2001. The record got a fair amount of press and publicity, probably because it was chock-full of big-name guest stars, but maybe because it was such a stunning album. I must have listened to the CD hundreds of times in the first few months I had it — it was so pretty, so lush, so weirdly out-of-time. It contrasted neatly with one of my other favorite records of the time period, Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You, and together those two albums, both hazy masterpieces, kicked off a strange decade with mystery, wonder, and quiet sadness.

Eventually my copy of Wonderful Life got too scratched up and scuffed to play very well, and to this day my mp3 rips of it are full of skipping and other problems. So listening to it now is more mysterious than ever — I am stuck with spectral versions of ghostly tracks, songs I know by heart but haven’t properly listened to in years. It’s both aggravating and satisfying — maybe the songs in my memory are better than any new versions I could buy from amazon.com.

Following up my obsession with It’s a Wonderful Life, I finally tracked down a copy of Good Morning Spider and proceeded to fall right in love with that album, too. Over a couple of cold, tough winters in remote regions of eastern Europe, I lived and breathed Sparklehorse songs, learned them on guitar, stared out of windows into the dark evenings with Good Morning Spider playing in the background. It’s even a sadder album than Wonderful Life, but I was impressed by Linkous’s simple life goal: “All I want is to be a happy man,” he sang. I could relate. This seems like something that ought to be possible to attain, like a fair thing to demand from life.

A few years later, during a more mundane phase of my own life, I made sure to buy the fourth album, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain . (This is actually one of the last times I bought a new CD — I was in a transitional phase towards buying only cheap used CDs or else going for cheap downloads.) Dreamt for Light Years, from 2006, is a really good album, too, though I never went through a phase of obsession like I had for the previous two. With its David Fridmann production it sounded kind of similar to contemporary Flaming Lips albums, and I was already on my way to getting tired of Wilco and Flaming Lips types of bands. Or maybe I was less enchanted with the album because my life was so much less turbulent than it had been during the previous two records. Who knows. Listening to it now, I find it better than I remembered — compared to earlier Sparklehorse it sounds pretty peaceful. Maybe this was the sound of Linkous accepting middle age? Maybe he wasn’t really going to teeter over the edge after all? Here and there he even sounds happy, though it is a desperate kind of happiness, hinted at by the album’s single, “Don’t Take My Sunshine Away.”

In recent years Sparkehorse has been in the news occasionally, mostly from the DangerMouse/David Lynch collaboration that hasn’t been officially released yet. Dark Night of the Soul is interesting too — I have listened to it a bit, though I can’t say it sounds too much like Sparklehorse. There is also a collaboration with Fennesz which has been sitting in my eMusic “save for later” section for a while:

But I find I don’t need these later efforts, even if they are impressive. The four albums alone (especially the middle two) are enough legacy for Mark Linkous to ultimately leave me grateful and even kind of overwhelmed. And the collaborations on It’s a Wonderful Life seem distracting to me now — I don’t really want to hear PJ Harvey and Tom Waits intruding on Linkous’s songs, though I really like the more anonymous female background vocals on Spider.

I prefer to ignore the collaborations and stick with his most basic work, because it is so rich and complex and leaves me with plenty to digest. I can’t think of any other musician who really captures the same type of atmosphere as Linkous. He was inspired by the poetic songs of Tom Waits, the simplicity of Daniel Johnston, and the country tinge of Neil Young, but had few contemporaries who matched his sense of vision. His songs are cinematic, or poetic, or mystical. He went back repeatedly to natural symbols and themes — ghosts, pianos, dogs, spiders, sparrows, teeth, sunshine — that almost add up to a coherent mythology.

I’m always fascinated by artists who develop their own symbols or entire mythologies. I love to hear about people who leave behind apartments full of obscure writing or drawing, or “outsider” artists who obsessively return to particular themes that nobody else can entirely understand. Mark Linkous’s songs have a lot of that same feeling, like hints of a supernatural world that only he could see. (There are traces of this in a handful of other latter-day musicians, particularly some of Phil Elverum’s Microphones/Mt. Eerie songs about wind and moon and sand.)

I think my fascination with these vague mythologies has some sort of complicated connection to my Catholic upbringing — I wouldn’t say we were “strict” Catholics but maybe the right word would be “staunch.” Growing up Catholic meant that there was this system around, a complicated but definitive one, that we slowly pieced together over time. There were rites and rituals, symbols and prayers. Certain colors in a mass meant one thing, others another — and this stuff wasn’t obvious. You wouldn’t know why a priest was wearing red one day, or why those candles were removed, or whatever. It required training and the ability to piece together various hints into something coherent. (Well, ok, you can argue about the coherence of Catholicism, but that’s a separate issue.) And trust me — everything about Catholicism and its rituals is carefully plotted, well thought-out, it’s all very deliberate. They don’t do random in Catholicism.

Since Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart two days ago, I have somehow found myself thinking about all the years I spent at Catholic funerals as a kid, serving mass and absorbing the symbols and ideas of a vast, complicated system. I don’t know if Linkous was religious — he mentions things like praying once in a while, but it is not at all obvious what he means. His religion seems far more likely to have been a construct of sunshine and woods than anything Christian. Ultimately, though, the symbols of Christianity have the same function as symbols built of leaves, and I think maybe it is appropriate to borrow some of the beautiful language of Catholic funeral masses.

The Catholic funeral mass uses words like this:

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.

This seems to be exactly what Mark Linkous would have wanted. Rest and light. Those aren’t symbols, they’re concrete parts of human existence, things we can all get from time to time even if happiness (or a house in the woods) is harder to find than it should be. Requiem æternam, Mark. Eternal rest.

So you tunnel through layers of meaning, right-clicking madly. You know that everything you find has been written or created by somebody else, but maybe nobody has looked at these things in quite the same way, or found the same striking juxtapositions. You right-click further…

I am listening to a live recording of the band S PRCSS, singing about the Sphinx’s nose, while reading articles about national politics, but something (the Sphinx’s nose?) compels me towards wikipedia to do an apparently pointless investigation of the history of cities throughout human history. And the wikipedians have composed a pretty fascinating list of the largest cities throughout history.

I like this list a lot. The first thing it does is provide a pretty good overview of human history, at least from a narrow, power-politics point of view. Thousands of years of Mesopotamian, Chinese, and especially Egyptian cities! I’ve always thought the ancient Egyptians were especially interesting, with their incredibly long-lasting empires and civilization. Then, aside from a few big cities in other parts of Asia, it’s all Rome and Constantinople for a while, until the Arabs come along and turn Baghdad into the center of human civilization.

Then it’s like, China (particularly Beijing), Constantinople, China, Istanbul, China, and so on for, like, most of the last millennium. Not until 1825 did London surge to the top, beat out by New York in 1925. Then Tokyo since 1965. It’s hard not to draw some historical parallels from those dates and cities. Hard not to think that the lowly U.S. of A. had its moment in the sun for about forty years and has been fading ever since. Forty years — a blink of an eye on this kind of scale.

In 1180, a city in Sri Lanka called Polonnaruwa was the largest in the world with a population of 250,000. Never heard of it — have you? I would venture to guess though that those 250,000 people did not care much about what was going on in the history I grew up learning… Crusades? Thomas Becket? Frederick Barbarossa? Whatever.

The world has grown smaller since 1180, but it’s hard for me to believe that the 32 million in Tokyo today care much about what is happening here in the United States. Why would they? Surely they are not concerned about what some senator from Iowa thinks about healthcare. There are billions of people right now who are happily ignorant of Iowa’s senator. So should I care about him? I dunno. I can’t help but feel like these things are important, but then I think about humanity on this kind of massive scale, and my concerns fade.

So then I think about stoicism again, which is basically the “Dust in the Wind” philosophy, so I shift over to youtube to find the most ludicrous versions of “Dust in the Wind” that I possibly can. It’s a tough call! It’s a really easy song to play on guitar, one of the first songs most people ever learn to play, and it also has this sort of tragicomic seriousness that lends itself to very very serious renditions. I mean, this song is deep.

Here’s a good example:

In the end, though, scrolling through the endless variations on “Dust in the Wind” makes me feel pretty excited about this ever-changin’ world in which we live in. Stoicism basically tells us to stay engaged with the world, but to not get too stressed about petty details like Iowan senators. Things will pass. In a thousand years nobody will know about soft rock songs, any more than I know about ancient Sri Lanka, but they are great while we have them. So I will continue to enjoy them while they last…

I felt grateful to live in this country! This doesn’t happen to me all that often. But I felt grateful that we have an ACLU, and enough engaged citizenry to make an impact. For all my many, many frustrations about politics, and all my disappointment in the lazy American people who support nonsensical policies when not busy watching So You Think You Can Dance?, this country can occasionally still impress me.

I had this odd swelling of pride because this morning, over breakfast, I read this terrifying article by Charles Bowden in Mother Jones, which I highly recommend reading. It’s about a Mexican journalist’s quest for asylum here in the U.S. He was fleeing the Mexican army, which reigns with impunity, fighting versus the narco-cartels for control of the drug trade. There is nowhere to run when the army is trying to kill you, so he’s exiled on this side of the border and hanging on.

It is a truly awful situation, and I think the U.S. is complicit in many ways, and has an obligation to help our neighboring country aside from the “Plan Mexico“/Merido Initiative. But at least domestically, for all the civil liberties we’ve tossed aside, I don’t see the American people ever accepting the military terrorizing the people. Maybe that is a naïve belief. It is easy to imagine scenarios where average Americans cheer on troops fighting the “War on Terror” against domestic enemies. But if the current weird right-wing protesters prove anything, it’s that the anti-government, anti-elite strain of American politics has not died out. And while I would like to see universal healthcare, I am also glad that Americans distrust the government. I wish they would distrust it a lot more, actually.

Anyway I am not saying that photographer’s rights to are as important as the right of journalists to live without intimidation. But there is a spectrum of authoritarianism, and I’m just glad that there is push-back still to be found in America. I read the international news. I notice when Russian human rights activists disappear. I notice when “color revolutions” from Burma to Belarus are brutally suppressed. The U.S. has corruption and serious flaws, but it is still a pretty great place, and I’m incredibly lucky to have been born here.

Cue up some lame patriotic music — though I guess we can all get behind this:

I have never written much of the stuff myself, but do write a lot of song lyrics which are kind of similar in some ways (as I mentioned in my last post). I like writing lyrics much more than I like singing, but sometimes the lyrics are pretty perfunctory or just thrown-together nonsense. And on very rare occasions I have started writing lyrics but abandoned the song, yet kept the lyrics around anyway, somewhere in my brain. What do you call song lyrics without the music? Doggerel. Usually.

I thought recently of the following charming bit of rhyme, an ex-song from around 1997. How awful that I called Michael Stipe and Bono old at the time! Michael Stipe would only have been around 37 — not old at all! Sorry Michael Stipe! And I don’t know why I claimed Lou Reed was not famous.

Here is a scan of this silly pseudo-poem, click through for a full-size legible version:

Here is a transcription, slightly corrected (i.e., “tinnitus” for “tinninitus”).

Michael Stipe, he shaves his head while
David Bowie follows trends
Neil Young, he never changes
Lou Reed never quite got famous.  

Thinning hair and aged appearance,
Rock stars looking like grandparents
Some sell out and some stay true
What's it mean to me and you

Comeback albums, comeback tours
Comeback hours, comeback whores
Rock 'n' roll was made for teens
So now what does Bob Dylan mean?

Bono doesn't seem to like us
Pete Townshend has got tinnitus
Springsteen's still an average guy
The Rolling Stones are just a punchline

When all ex-Beatles have been knighted
Will John Lydon get invited?
Who knew Patti Smith existed?
Rock 'n' roll is pushing 50

And what about that place in Cleveland?
Another building no one needed
Kids who tried to break the rules
Now end up trapped in exhibit halls

Background music in a bar's the
Last insult to aging rock stars
Music written from the soul is
turned to muzak, bought and sold

The critics say you've lost your edge
Or that the fame went to your head
Biographies full of attacks and
Your catalog's owned by Michael Jackson

So tell me now what are you feeling
When you play sold-out arenas
Where every single person knows
The words you wrote 20 years ago

Do those words ring true today
And do you still have something to say?
When you sling on that guitar and play
Is it for the future or yesterday?

Do you still believe in rock and roll?
I guess that's what I want to know

Ouch! Take that rock stars! Getting awkwardly called out by a snotty 20-year old, I bet that stung. Actually I mostly remember this “poem” from time to time based on the line about “thinning hair and aged appearance”… How quickly things change.