canned dragons
Qobuz A Year Later
My sister’s boyfriend recently asked me if I was still using Qobuz, a year after we first talked about the streaming music service. I answered in the affirmative, having just renewed my subscription a couple of months ago, at which point he told me that he had switched back after giving Tidal a try. The biggest issue he mentioned running into with Qobuz was slow downloads.
I could relate to the complaint. For the most part, Qobuz is amazing. The quality of the music, the selection, the interface, and the integration with Roon are all high points.1 The downloads are painful, though. They are almost unbearably slow. If you are old enough, they will remind you of days downloading MP3s over dial-up.2 Not only does saving music locally take a lot of time, but you need to have the app open while the download operation is taking place. That means, in effect, that you will start to download an album, then walk away or do something else, only to have the download operation stop partway through. It’s frustrating to try and listen to the new hotness (or old hotness) on your way to work only to realize that you only have part of what you had intended to save. This is not a rare occurrence, either.
One thing that my sister’s boyfriend noticed, though, was that some music was quicker to download. In particular, a Billy Eilish album was speedy to complete. I thought about it for a second and realized that must be a result of using a content delivery network (CDN). I’m not sure what cloud provider Qobuz is using, but I would imagine that more popular songs that many people are streaming (such as those by Eilish) get cached to an edge location. When they are retrieved from that cache, they are more easily available. This would explain why, when I’m downloading a 1993 album from the band Tiger Trap, it has to go all the way to the storage on the origin server. It simply hasn’t cached those files to the edge locations because not many people are accessing them.
This isn’t an easy problem to solve, because it’s architecturally an economy of scale issue. I suppose the only way to improve the situation is to get more people to sign up for Qobuz and download outsider music. Consider this your invitation.
Analogue Grand Diary
Maybe it’s a bit early to be making New Year’s resolutions. Though this used to be a popular practice, many now don’t even believe in setting stretch goals just because the calendar changes. I confess that I have waxed and waned in my observance of making annual resolutions. This year, though, I have something lined up that I think will actually improve my life in meaningful ways.
I’m trying to go more analogue after the Christmas holiday. My Christmas list consists of items to help me do that. Now, before I reveal what is on the list, I have to admit that I’m fudging the idea of analogue a bit. In this context, analogue may contain a bit of digital, as long as it keeps me disconnected from the great network. I’ve been developing the idea that the internet is a place to go for a specific reason.
When I worked in retail, I was introduced to the concept of destination shopping. The idea consisted of the belief that customers were in your store for a particular reason. If you worked at a “destination,” the theory went, customers were there to buy rather than to look around. If you bought into it, you had reason enough to disregard customers quick responses of “just looking” when you asked if you could help them. It could mean being an obtrusive sales associate, but that was sometimes encouraged.
I want to treat the internet as a destination. Too often, I’m logged on to browse around and look for whatever may catch my fancy. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it lacks intent. When you have no intent, and no focus, you quite often end up wasting time which would have been better spent in other activities.
If I can work with tools that help me to avoid mindless internet browsing, I think I can improve my attention span and spend time more intentionally.
Here is the list of tools (some of which made it to afformentioned Christmas list):
- Bullet Journal - I didn’t start a new one last year, and it’s always hard to begin off-cycle. I missed it, even if my cat is my enemy here because he loves to attack the placeholder strings.
- FiiO DM13 portable CD player - This is what I meant when I said I was bending the definition of analogue. Sure, technically the CD player is digital, but it will keep me from going to an internet-connected device when I want to listen to music.
- The Orthodox Study Bible from Ancient Faith Ministries - This was just gifted to me by a close friend for the Nativity. I plan to make good use of the apocryphal books and also footnotes in areas that I thought I had great familiarity with (like the Gospels).
- Kindle Paperwhite - My favorite reading device. Loaded up with books from the Amazon store, articles from Matter, as well as classics from Standard eBooks, this is an extremely useful tool.
My bed will no doubt be littered with items at the end of the night, as opposed to just my iPad, but I need to detach myself somewhat from the full-featured tablet.
Post Dreams
Not too long ago, I posted about a shoegaze cover of a music charts staple from decades ago and, well, I was sorely tempted to do it again.
I came across a YouTube channel for a service called Musora which is billed as “the ultimate music lessons experience.” Musora offers a subscription which will help you learn to play an instrument and your favorite songs. For $20/month (with an annual subscription), you gain access to a suite of interactive practice tools and a community of like-minded students.
In the video from Musora that I stumbled upon (algorithms can be helpful), shoegaze band La Lune is challenged to reimagine Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” on the spot. I’ve listened to “Dreams” quite a few times recently, so I was instantly drawn to the concept and this particular setup. The video features the band constructing their version of the song and then executing on their vision. It’s hard to call a shoegaze version of a classic rock standard a “straight cover.” However, La Lune maintain the darkly sweet intent of the original while bringing the “reverb, dissonance and distortion” that are features of the genre. It feels like a perfect update to the Fleetwood Mac classic. Though there is some discussion about how the vocals will be done during the planning section, bassist Olivia Wells handles the duties with aplomb.
La Lune - Dreams (YouTube)
Vancouver’s La Lune is new to the scene, with only an EP, Disparity, that was released this year to comprise their discography. Though the lead track starts out with accoustic guitar, the EP quickly proves its shoegaze bona fides, with crushing walls of distortion and epic dynamics. The title track is a harrowing, almost claustrophobic slice of dreampop.
The Man Who Would Be King
Michael Caine and Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
One of my all-time favorite films is John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. I was first introduced to the movie adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling short story from 1888 by my English teacher in my senior year of high school. Kipling’s novel encapsulates some of the folly and hubris of the British adventures in Afghanistan in the 19th century by infusing its characters with the attitudes of empire. In the film, Michael Caine and Sean Connery play British ex-military who dream much and doubt their abilities little. They set their sites on bringing the martial prowess learned in their earlier days to a remote area of Afghanistan known as Kafiristan to form their own kingdom.
After crossing treacherous and unforgiving mountains, the film’s two main characters do, little by little, one tribe at a time, find themselves ruling over the natives of the area. Their success owes itself to the guns the men bring with them and their tactical skill in using them to subdue their enemies. They also bring knowledge of governance borrowed broadly from the British Empire, particularly the Dutch East India Trading Company. As their success grows, Connery’s character succumbs to the force of his own internal narrative that he is, as the natives proclaim him to be, the descendent of Alexander the Great. This gives him a god-like status that he comes to embrace, against the protestations of Caine’s character.
Inevitably, the illusion is dispelled and the British adventurers are discovered to be mortal. Their downfall is as swift as it is brutal as the Kafiris drive them out. Their hasty departure mirrors the initial British exit under pressure in Kabul in 1842, which saw only one British soldier survive to reach the destination in Jalalabad. His compatriots at the base there asked him where the army was, to which he famously replied, I am the army.
Only a few short years after the story was published by Kipling, Kafiristan was conquered by Abdur Rahman Khan, who converted the pagan Kafiris to Islam. The area was renamed Nuristan (“land of light”). Nuristan continued to be fairly autonomous, even after the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in the 1990s.
Azam Ahmed tells the tale of how the Americans came to Nuristan after 9/11 and turned an area that was suspicious of the Taliban into a stronghold for the group (NYT gift article). The Americans brought their tactical superiority and advanced weaponry to the area and, over a few years, managed to turn even their initial allies against them by virtually indiscriminate killings and misunderstanding the culture of the area. Even after the American military was essentially driven out by Taliban-backed local militias, they returned simply to bomb the area, murdering civilians and ensuring the populace would never forgive them.
I will be pondering Ahmed’s article for a long time, and I can’t help but think of the parallels to the Kipling story. The analogy isn’t perfect, of course, but it maintains the thread of a more advanced civilization underestimating the power of a more primitive one. Kipling isn’t the only creator to have explored this concept. Even George Lucas mined the idea for his third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi. Lucas has spoken specifically about the desire to show a simple culture (the Ewoks) defeating a technologically modern military. Many fans have debated the wisdom of making the Ewoks so childish, but the point was made.
The Man Who Would Be King is currently available to stream for free on Tubi.
Like A Virgin
Madonna’s most well-known album, Like A Virgin just celebrated its 40th anniversary.
Like A Virgin was the first record I owned, given to me by my parents for my 9th birthday. The subject might have been a bit mature for me at that age, but it hardly mattered because I promptly broke the stylus on the family turntable. I couldn’t even listen to my gift. Of course, the hit songs from the record were all over commercial radio, anyway, so it wasn’t like Madonna’s tunes were hiding in obscurity.
The record survived me growing up and came with me throughout moves and changes. I still rotate it, and it still sounds fantastic (probably because I couldn’t wear it out when I was younger). The contributions of Nile Rodgers, who was fresh off producing Let’s Dance for David Bowie, played a major part in shaping the pop greatness of the album. Rodgers wasn’t sure about the collaboration at first, though.
When he was offered the producer gig, he wasn’t immediately sold, because some of Madonna’s peers bemoaned that she was a “totally self-centered bitch” who was a painful collaborator. But he said yes and, upon them linking up, found the budding superstar to be a “true professional.” “If you don’t love these songs, we can’t work together,” Madonna told Rodgers upon showing him the demos she’d made with Bray. “I don’t love them now,” Rodgers responded, “but I will when I’ve finished working on them!”
My favorite track is “Angel,” which the early American shoegaze band Drop Nineteens covered on their 1992 album Delaware. The shoegaze version is noisy and has a blistering intensity that turns the smoothness of the original into an assault on the senses. Drop Nineteens, which only recently got back together to release new music, still place the song in their live sets.
Drop Nineteens - Angel (YouTube)
Like A Virgin is now available in Hi-res on services like Qobuz and the upgrade adds clarity and punch to the original recording.
OPRA
Roon Audio has a new feature that should delight headphone lovers — OPRA (Open Profiles for Revealing Audio). OPRA is an open-source repository hosted on GitHub that contains precisely crafted headphone curves for different headphone models (and you get an equalizer, and you get an equalizer…).
I love Roon, although I’ve had my share of technical challenges — today I need to bring up two issues on the Roon Community forum. The ability of the platform to continuously innovate ways to give audio enthusiasts a better experience is impressive.
I’m a bit surprised, but pleased, that Target carries Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble’s Memento Mori gift set.
For my money, Garrison Keillor does the gratitude thing about as eloquently as one possibly could. I need to get on his level of thankfulness.
I sit and stare at the screen watching men crash into each other and I’m grateful for cowardice: I never played football so now I don’t have the aches and pains that my heroic classmates have. I fooled around with drugs in college but they were cheap crummy drugs, not the powerful chemicals of today that lead a person to make a life sleeping in the park. I’m grateful that I was born late enough so that when I developed mitral valve problems, open-heart surgery was rather common so I didn’t die in my late 50s as two of my uncles did.