Philip Cody

Mister Analog's Digital Dreams

Sat, 01 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

It's Deneueve! She's smiling at me from my PC monitor. Her eyes beckon and she says, "Is that an intercontinental ballistic missile in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?" I reach out for her. I touch her face and her face becomes the sun. My fingers begin to smolder and burst into flames. I'm on fire. No . . . I am fire. I fall into the sun. I am one with it. Here comes the sun. Here comes the Sun King. I am sinking in the west. I'm melting! I can feel myself breaking up into thousands of discrete puddles of molten flesh. The computer screen goes blank and suddenly all is dark . . .

I am drifting though space, locked in a cocoon of metal and plastic with only the sound of my own breathing for company. I'm feeling cramped and ill-at-ease. Tiny motes of light flash intermittently around me like colorful, pesky bugs. I reach out to swat them, only to skin my knuckles on the hard surface of my enclosure. A small, oval window appears before me. Looking out, I can see what appears to be a large, space craft, shaped like a giant femur, tumbling though space. I hear myself say, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL, open the pod bay doors."

My sister, Grace and her boyfriend, Fontayne P. Farnsworth III got married last month. Grace and Fonzy Farnsworth had been going steady since 1968 and the news of this totally reckless and impulsive act came as quite a pleasant surprise to me. Fonzy is a Big Fucking Deal in the banking business and has more money than God, lives in a house the size of the Astro-Dome, and has been madly, passionately, and faithfully in love with my sister all these years.

Grace, for her part, has been content to spend the last thirty years living in her tiny trailer on Cedar Street, with her cats, candles and potpourri and, up until last week, had resisted Fonzy's efforts to shower her with expensive gifts, fancy cars, elegant clothes, luxurious homes and forty seven proposals of marriage. Her acquiescence, this late in the game, was momentous, significant and cause for celebration. So I grabbed a few bottles of Chateau La Shitface and a fistful of Cohibas and headed down the I-5 to spend a few days partying with the happy newlyweds.

I no sooner pulled into the driveway than Fonzy came storming out of the house, tears streaming down his face, looking like he hadn't slept in a couple of days.

"Analog, she's gone!"

"What the fuck do you mean, Fonzy? Where's Grace?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you. She's left me."

It seems that, after the honeymoon, the two lovebirds came back to Castle Farnsworth and Grace immediately started putting candles and incense all over the house . . . and Glade Plug-Ins in every available outlet. Old Fonz bit his lip and said nothing for a couple of days. Then, Grace went out to Fonzy's studio, the pride of his life . . . his sanctum sanctorum . . . his scratch-your-nuts-drink-beer-and-fart-your-brains-out place and put a bayberry candle on his desk, two cones of coconut incense in his ash tray and a Glade "Forever Springtime" plug-in in the wall.

Needless to say, Fonz had a shit fit. He completely lost his cool and started yelling at Grace to get that smelly crap out of his studio . . . and out of HIS house. Poor Grace. She burst into tears, ran out of the studio, jumped into Fonzy's 63 Caddy convertible and raced off. As of my arrival, she'd been gone for three days.

I got my blubbering brother-in-law back into the house, sat him down in front of a Mariners game on the giant screen TV, put a bottle of Jack Daniels between his feet, and went into the kitchen to make a few phone calls. I got lucky on the second try. Grace was down in Redding with her girlfriend, Luanda and no . . . she had no intention of coming back until SHE was good and ready . . . if ever . . . goodbye!

"Did you find her?"

"Yeah, Fonz, I found her."

"Where?"

"She's down in Redding with her friend, Luanda."

"I've got to go to her."

"I don't think she wants to see you right now."

"Listen, I've got to see her and tell her I'm sorry. Stay here. Make yourself at home. I'll be back in a day or two. There's a hundred pound bag of Science Diet in the garage. Make sure Bruno and Brunhilda get fed."

And off he went, leaving me alone in that great big house with Bruno and Brunhilda. Who the fuck were Bruno and Brunhilda?

As it turned out, Bruno and Brunhilda were two of the ugliest, meanest, most dangerous looking Dobermans on the face of the earth. They were blue Dobermans. They didn't have any brown on them like your regular Dobie. They were all blue-black, weighed about a hundred pounds each, were both as bald as billiard balls . . . and as nasty and vicious looking as a premenstrual Leona Helmsley. The good news was that they were safely ensconced behind a chain link fence in their own little compound. The bad news . . . their food bowls were all the way over on the other side of the pen.

"Fuck this, " I told myself. I wasn't about to open the gate and get in there with those two, hungry man-eaters. So . . . I went into the garage, filled a bucket with chunks of Science Diet and went out and started throwing the food over the fence. Those fuckers were good! I must have thrown about thirty or forty charcoal-briquet sized food nuggets over the fence and only two of them ever hit the ground. I made a game of it. I'd hold up a chunk of food to get their attention, say "good doggies, good doggies" and I'd lob the sucker way up high and one of them would run under it and snatch it out of mid-air. I did that until the bucket was empty and my arm was sore. Having fed the Baskerville twins, I decided to explore the grounds.

I found the key to Fonzy's studio in a little ceramic pig on a workbench in the garage. Inside, the studio was cool and dark and lit up like a Christmas tree. There were racks upon racks of outboard gear, three keyboards, two desktop PCs, a laptop, a pair of huge, Tanberg studio monitors hanging from the ceiling and a pair of Event bas 20/20s resting above the recording console.

One might get the idea from looking at all this stuff that Fontayne Farnsworth was quite a musician . . . and one would be absolutely wrong! Oh, Fonzy played guitar. Badly! He could hammer out chords on a keyboard . . . but so could a chimpanzee. And, if pitch isn't a problem for you, Fonzy could sing. No, his true talent was for making and spending money and, nowhere was this talent more apparent than in this place. No consumer stuff for the Fonz. Pro shit all the way. All of it the very best, most up-to-date, and most expensive. It didn't matter that the fat, little fucker could hardly play a lick or that he had a tin ear. This was HIS studio and there probably wasn't a better equipped home studio anywhere in America. Looking around, I was more than just a little bit pissed off and feeling a whole shitload of envy.

I sat down at Fonzy's desk and watched his personal stock ticker scroll across a 19 inch monitor. There it was, right before my eyes . . . Fonzy's main axe. Watching the ticker move across the screen I began to get drowsy and, as I nodded off, I began to dream . . .

I dreamed that I was on the bank of a river. I was on my belly, looking down into a rapidly moving stream of numbers and symbols. Just below the surface I could see the gleam of a beautiful, golden fish. I reached out for it and it swam off, just beyond my grasp. I reached out a bit further and touched a gilded flank but the fish eluded me again. I stretched out as far as I could to make another grab and, in the attempt, fell headlong into the river.

The raging torrent carried me along swiftly. I didn't feel like I was in any immediate danger. In fact, the ride was quite exhilarating . . . very much like a roller coaster. Every once in a while, the river would drag me under and let me back up a few seconds later. Eventually, the current slowed down and I found myself in a deep, wide pool of ones and zeros, populated by thousands of golden fish. Off in the distance, I could hear bells ringing. The ringing grew progressively louder and more insistent.

I woke up. The phone was ringing.

"Hullo"

"Can I speak to Tammy, please?"

"Sorry, there's no Tammy here."

"Let me talk to Tammy, god dammit!"

"I told you man, there's no Tammy at this number."

"Hey, ass hole . . . put Tammy on the fucking phone!"

"Who're you calling an ass hole, ass hole?"

"Fuck you! You tell that bitch to get her ass on the phone right now . . . or I'm gonna come over there and kick the ever-loving shit out of the both of you!"

"Just a sec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hey, man . . . Tammy says that you can just go fuck yourself and that she'd rather eat toad shit than talk to a weasel dick mother fucker like you."

CLICK!

Normally, such an exchange would leave me feeling warm and fuzzy all over, but my dream, and its implications, kept intruding into my consciousness. What really bothered me most was the thought that somewhere, deep in my subconscious, I might possibly be harboring a desire to swim in digital waters. Me, Mister Analog, one of the last bastions of analog sanity in a world gone digitally mad. The idea was extremely depressing and, the more I thought about it, the more depressed I became.

I got up and walked over to a small bar and picked out a sixteen ounce tumbler. I opened a little fridge under the bar and lifted out two ice cubes and put them in the glass. I unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin and filled the tumbler half way. I walked back over to the desk, sat down and drained the gin in two, big gulps.

The first thing that I noticed was a hot, burning sensation in my gut. Then my lips went numb. My eyes started to water. I heard whimpering and realized that it was coming from me. I was crying and I couldn't stop crying. After I while I was sobbing uncontrollably. I heard a small, nasty voice in the back of my mind saying, "Better dead than digital . . . . better dead than digital . . . better dead . . ."

I knew what I had to do.

There weren't any guns in the studio. So, I stumbled over to the house but, try as I might, I couldn't find any guns there either. There were some really nasty looking knives in the kitchen but I couldn't feature stabbing myself to death. My drunken mind reasoned that all rich guys had guns and that my brother-in-law was so rich that he had to have an entire arsenal somewhere. But where? The garage, of course!

I was right. There, under a rack filled with fishing rods was what looked to be a large, red refrigerator with a combination lock on the door. A gun locker. A locked gun locker. A fucking locked mother fucking gun fucking locker. I started banging on its door.

"Let me in goddam it! I've got a date with death!"

No such luck. I looked around for something to pry the gun locker open but there weren't any tools to be found.

"Who the fuck has a garage with no fucking tools in it?"

I went storming out of the garage and got about ten or so feet into the yard when I fell, ass over tea kettle, over Fonzy's Florentine marble birdbath. I sat there for a moment, disoriented, trying to focus. When my vision cleared I looked down the grassy embankment and saw Bruno and Brunhilda, asleep in a shady corner of their compound. An evil chuckle welled up in my throat.

Slowly, I lifted the latch on the metal gate and entered the arena of death. I was scared shitless but determined. Death by dog would be a fitting end to my already unconventional life. Painful and messy, yes . . . but fitting. I sat down on the ground, about fifty feet away from the still slumbering hell hounds. I thought about my own pooch, Lance and I hoped that he would find it in his heart to forgive me. Then, I realized that I hadn't left a note. I worried that Grace and Fonzy would get back and find me torn to shreds and think this some terrible accident. I tried to rise but my legs wouldn't support me.

"Fuck the note," I thought. "In five minutes I'm going to be dead and it's not going to matter, one way or the other, what the fuck anybody thinks."

So I sat there, raised my arms and hooked my fingers through the metal links of the fence. I lifted my chin to give the dogs a good, clean shot at my throat and called out, "Here doggies. Nice doggies. Come and get me."

Nada. The dogs didn't bat an eye.

I started screaming at them. "Wake up you stupid, ugly, sorry-assed excuses for dogs. You canine pansies. Eat me, mother fuckers! Eat me."

It was then that I passed out.

I awoke to the huge, slobbery tongue and intense dog breath of Bruno in my face. I looked down and Brunhilda had her chin in my lap and was looking up at me with big, sad, soulful eyes. I berated both dogs for being such pussies, telling them that they were a disgrace to their breed. Then I stroked Brunhilda's bald brow and gave Bruno a big fat kiss on his doggie lips and began laughing hysterically.

"Analog, what the fuck is going on here?"

It was Fonzy. He and my sister were standing at the opened gate, hand in hand, beaming with rekindled, newlywed bliss.

"Just playing with the dogs, Fonz. Just playing with the dogs."

I picked myself up. Walked over to Grace and gave her the biggest, good-to-be-alive hug I could muster.

"You okay, sis?"

Grace looked over at her husband and sighed . . . then looked at me and smiled, "Yes, big brother, I most certainly am."

And so was I!

To be continued . . . . .

Copyright 1998 by Philip Cody

Mister Analog Does Windows

Mon, 01 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

"When I'm drivin' in my car,
And the man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination"
.....................(Mick Jagger/Keith Richard)

Where the do I want to go today?

Hey, Microsoft! I want to go fishing today. I want to wade out into a stream and feel the cold rush of freezing water between my legs. I want to stumble across the gravel of a stream bed, fighting for balance against the relentless push of the current. I want to wrestle a five- pound rainbow trout to a standstill in the midst of a springtime wilderness. Can you take me there, Microsoft?

I didn't think so!

Yo, MS! I've got it. Florence, Italy! I want to sit down in the middle of the Ponte Vecchio with a jug of local swill and play my guitar . . . and bay at the Mediterranean moon like a drunken coyote. Can you do that for me?

"Airline tickets," you say. Not really the same thing is it?

Wait! I know . . . I know! I want to go down on Catherine Denueve today. I want to taste the . . . .

Oh Bill, you're blushing!

Win98 - Analog Style:

Windows 98 will be out soon. Word out of Redmond has it that the new Windows will educate your kids, pay your bills, de-flea your dog, find your soul-mate, make your breakfast, blow your nose, wipe your ass, and suck your dick. Haven't got a dick? Not to worry. Windows 98 will create one for you!

Just kidding! As far as I know, this new iteration of the Windows operating system will not support penile generation. No pecker paradigm. No schwantz API. If you want a dick, you're going to either have to get one installed surgically or wait for Win 2000. Sorry girls . . .

Bill and Me - February 1996:

"Mr. Gates?"

"Yes, Holly."

"It's Mister Analog on line three."

"Put him through and hold my calls."

"Analog?"

"Fuckstick?"

"Scumfuck!"

"Dicknose!"

"Numbnuts!"

" How's my favorite scumbag billionaire?"

"Fucking great! How's my favorite Luddite pain-in-the-ass?"

"How am I? I'll tell you how the fuck I am! I've spent every waking moment, since you unleashed Windows 95 on the world, tweaking one setting after another, fucking with the registry, installing drivers, de-installing Windows, re-installing Windows, reformatting my hard drive, talking to tech support, talking to my shrink . . . I've lost forty pounds, I've got hemorrhoids the size of cantaloupes and I haven't gotten laid in six months. Six mother-non- fucking months!"

"Splendid! And how's the family?"

"Family? I don't have a family, you asswipe! I don't have the time. If had I a family they, more than likely, would have left me a long time ago."

"Oh . . . sorry to hear that. Do you need a place to stay?"

Bill and Me - May 1997:

"Hullo."

"Analog?"

"Yep, that's me. Who the fuck are you?"

"It's Bill."

"Mister President?"

"No, you ball brained twit! Gates . . . Bill Gates!"

"Fuckface!!! How the hell are you?"

"I'm rich . . . I'm in control . . . and I'm in a hurry."

"In that case, I won't keep you. Bye. Have a nice day."

(click)

"Hullo."

"Analog?"

"Gates?"

"Sorry."

"Can I have that in writing?"

"Stop busting my balls."

"But Bill . . . you're rich and in control. How could I possibly bust your balls?"

"Look . . . I said I'm sorry, dammit!"

"Okay, mouse dick . . . where do YOU want to go today?"

"Very funny."

"I couldn't resist."

"Look . . . I'd like to get your take on a new feature we're thinking of adding to Windows 98."

"You want my take? Moi? Little old Luddite, me?"

"Will you just shut the fuck up and listen for a goddamned minute!"

"I'm all aural peripherals . . . shoot."

"Dual Monitors!"

"Dual monitors? That's it? You called me at two o'fucking clock in the morning to tell me about dual monitors?"

"Analog . . . just imagine, for a moment . . . you're sitting at your desk. In one monitor you're running Word to write your asinine, Luddite drivel . . . and in another monitor you're cruising your favorite porno sites on the World Wide Web. Doesn't that sound wonderful?"

"I'd need a bigger desk."

"Uh huh."

"Two graphics adapters?"

"Yup."

"Hmmmm . . ."

"What do you think?"

"Pointless."

"Excellent!"

"Stupid."

"You're so right!"

"Expensive."

"Yes! It's perfect! Analog, you've done it again."

"You know, Bill . . . there are thousands of folks out in the real world who can't get their shit to work right with one video card. How are they going to be able to deal with two?

"Fuck 'em!"

"That's what I love about you, Gates. You're all heart."

"Gee . . . thanks!"

Going to the dogs:

I've come up with an idea for a brand new operating system. It's called CHEEKS! - The Tweakable OS. Get it? CHEEKS! Tweakable . . ????

Snicker all you want but, when I'm at the top of the PC heap and all you dickwads are groveling to be first in line to kiss my ass, I'm going to remember who was naughty and who was nice.

I pitched the idea to my dog, Lance. He actually stopped chewing on his balls for five whole minutes as I was telling him about it . . .

"Hey Lance, check this out."

"Rwwlslurp!"

"Lance, stop licking your nuts and look at me."

"Aarrowwlff."

"Good doggie! I've come up with an idea for a brand new operating system, Lance. It's called CHEEKS! - The Tweakable OS. Get it? CHEEKS! Tweakable!"

"Grrrrrrrr!!"

"Try to keep an open mind. Okay?"

"Rooofff!"

"Look, it's like this . . . Microsoft has a stranglehold on the operating system market. There aren't any real options out there except Windows. Right?"

"Grawllloooof?"

"Unix? Too academic, Lance. Too much typing. Too much like DOS."

"Yap!"

"Macintosh? Get real, Lance. Not even God can save the Mac."

"Argrolff?"

"Solaris? What the fuck is that, Lance? You made that one up . . . right?"

"Yip! Garruff!"

"Okay . . . I'll get to the point. CHEEKS! is a modular operating system. What you get, out of the box, for $49.95, is the basic, system core that handles file management, input and output, the user interface and system maintenance. You can then purchase individual modules or "Tweaks" to handle your various computing needs. Each Tweak, when installed, would analyze your computer and set up only the files and drivers needed to optimize your particular system for the job you want it to do. There'd be an Office Tweak with a word processor, database, spreadsheet and PIM . . . a Communications Tweak for faxing, cruising the Web, downloading files . . . a LAN Tweak, a Gamer's Tweak, a Graphics Tweak, an Audio Tweak . . .

Best of all, boy . . . the Tweaks would be flexible! You can tweak the Tweaks, Lanceroo! Fuck with them to your heart's desire. CHEEKS! can remember all your changes so . . . if you change your mind or want to remove a Tweak completely . . . no problem! Click on an icon and poof! You're back to square one or two or three. For twenty nine bucks a module, how can you go wrong? The weenies at Microsoft are going to be shitting in their pants, old dog!

So . . . what do you think, Lance? Pretty cool, huh?

Lance?"

"z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z"

"Get the fuck out of my chair you stupid mutt!"

And Finally . . .

We all probably spend too much time in front of our computers. What the fuck! It's springtime. The sun is out. There's a nice breeze. Why not just shut the sucker down for the day, go out in the back yard, find a spot with an unobstructed view of the sky and watch some real clouds for a change? Not those ubiquitous, pixelated, unchanging, Windows wallpaper, virtual sons of bitches that monopolize our every waking moment.

Look! That one up there . . . it looks like Mickey Mouse! Over there . . . to the right. Starship Enterprise! Yo, Scotty . . . beam me the fuck up! To the south. See that? That group of cumulus, just above the horizon? It's Monica Lewinsky giving the President a blow job!!!

This is Mister Analog wishing you peace, prosperity and . . . . alt/ctrl/del!

Copyright 1998 Philip Cody

Mister Analog's Attic

Fri, 01 May 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I have an eight-track tape of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It's in a box, in my attic, nestled among other mementos of my analog life ... a trumpet mouthpiece, a wire recording of Gene Krupa's big band that my uncle made in the early Fifties, a small, leather pouch with three New York subway tokens from when tokens were a quarter, an empty pack of Lucky Strikes ... and a whole lot of other shit rendered useless and obsolete by the passing of time.

Nowhere, of course, in that box of archaic debris ... nowhere in my attic ... or in the state of Oregon ... nowhere in the entire U-S-of-fucking-A ... or the whole goddamned world, for that matter, does there exist an eight-track device into which I can insert this hunk of lifeless, black plastic and call forth the sweet, hard-on evoking sounds of my youth ... that filled my adolescent nights with the magic of ...

Sheh - reeeee
She - eh - eh - er - eee bay - yay - bee
She - ehr - reee
Won't you come out tonight

(Come, come ... come out to-nye-yight!)

No ... this particular alignment of metallic particles will never see a charge again. Silent now, it can never again fill the warm summer air with the horny love call of young men in tight pants. Useless now, it lies in a shroud of cobwebs, a mute remnant of a forgotten moment in time. An artifact now ... it remains as a missing piece to a puzzle, found, long after the rest of the puzzle has been lost.

In the course of our everyday lives, we have learned to take the hype and bullshit of digital technology in stride. Inundated with promotional information at every turn, most of us have come to believe the promise that "digital" will make everything better ... whether it has to do with music, education, finding our way around town, securing a job, purchasing a dildo or getting laid.

In a great many instances, "digital" certainly seems to be making things easier. If you're living way the hell out in East Bumfuck, Idaho, for example, and you get a craving for pickled frogs' legs in cream sauce ... you would have an easier time, with greater potential for success and get them on your plate faster by logging onto the Internet and doing a HotBot search for "frogs' legs" ... than you would driving fifty miles to the nearest Wal-Mart. Plus ... you wouldn't have to deal with an army of semi-literate, mutant jerk-offs, wearing smiley-face buttons. Personally, I enjoy the company of semi-literate, mutant jerk-offs ... though I wish they'd 86 the smiley-face shit ... and I welcome the opportunity to make the long drive to hang out with my Wal-Mart homeys.

If you believe that ... here's some more shit for your digital compost heap. Music recorded on analog tape sounds better than music recorded on any of the current digital media. There's a brightness and sparkle to well made analog recordings that seems to be absent in the digital domain. It's true that digital provides for a "cleaner" end result, but the price you pay for that cleanliness is often a dull, lifeless sounding track. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that you'd have to apply twice as much processing to a digital track ... to get it to sound as good as analog. Sure ... digital recording facilitates a great many editing opportunities that just aren't available to the analog recordist ... big fucking deal! Easier doesn't necessarily mean better. Easier only means that any semi-literate, mutant jerk-off can make a reasonable facsimile of a professional recording.

Meanwhile, back in the attic ...

Would you look at all this stuff! Boxes of old demos on two-track reels and not a two-track machine within a hundred miles. Stacks of old LPs ... a pile of silent vinyl without a turntable to give it life. Half a dozen Syquest 44 cartridges, filled with EPS samples and ... good golly, Miss Molly ... there's the old, noisy, temperamental Syquest drive right alongside. The EPS sampler, unfortunately, is somewhere in Bakersfield. I gave it to Spanky Beckwirth and he traded it for a TX81Z and a Micro-Verb. Spanky says he got the better end of the deal and I don't doubt that he's right.

The problem with the technological roller coaster we call "life at the end of the twentieth century" is ... once you get on it's almost impossible to get off ... and, when you get to the bottom of one hill, you have to change cars to get over the next ... and change again at the bottom of that one ... and so on and so on. I don't find this a particularly easy or enjoyable way to live. The rapid rate of descent and the continual stops and starts leave me feeling queasy to the point where I think I'm going to puke.

Then there's all those empty, riderless cars back down the line. What a fucking waste. Someone ought to hang out a sign that says "Welcome to the digital age ... where today's cool technology is tomorrow's pile of useless garbage!" Not that it would make a great deal of difference. Most of us are committed, via large expenditures of time and money, to staying on until the ride is over ... regardless of the toll it takes on our humanity and our environment.

As for myself ... I'm going to do a "Nancy Reagan" and just say NO. N - fucking - O!

I'm going to close my eyes and jump, in the hope that I come down, feet first, on solid, dependable, analog ground. Will I miss my techno toys? Like a recovering junkie misses his needle. But I'll be okay ... and I'll be here, every time your digital express leaves the station, running down the platform, waving your analog baggage in the air, shouting, "YOU FORGOT SOMETHING! YOU'RE GOING TO NEED CLEAN UNDERWEAR! DON'T LEAVE WITHOUT YOUR HAIR DRYER! WHAT ABOUT YOUR CONDOMS?!"

This is Mister Analog, bidding you peace, prosperity and ... bon voyage!

================================================
Copyright - Philip Cody 1998
================================================

Mister Analog Goes to NAMM

Wed, 01 Apr 1998 00:00:00 GMT

I got into this year's NAMM convention courtesy of Celia Biggs, who works at SONY up here in Eugene. Celia's an attractive, middle-aged woman who lives a couple of houses down from me. She gave me a pass to this NAMM thing, saying how she thought it might help to expand my horizons. In-fucking-deed!! Here's a woman . . . works eight hours a day, stamping out CDs in a sterile environment, telling me that MY horizons needed to expand. I felt like telling her that I had something besides "horizons" that needed expanding . . . but I didn't. I simply accepted her gift with as much graciousness as I could muster, tucked the pass in my pocket and trucked on off, with the intention of tossing it in the trash when I got home.

ED FURILLO! The pass was made out to this guy, Furillo, who was, evidently, going to be too busy getting his "horizons" expanded by the succulent Celia to be representing his Japanese masters in the City of Angels that weekend. Probably told the wife that he was going and, instead, booked a room at the Muddy Creek Motor Lodge, where he and Miz C. will engage in all manner of nasty, analog pleasures, while yours truly slogs his way through aisle after aisle of digitalia in the grunge and heat of La La Land.

Have a nice trip, Ed!

Then, just as I was getting ready to skim it into the trash can, it dawned on me that this little, plastic rectangle might be the key to a whole lot of fun. What if I were to scoot down to LA for a weekend and pretend to be this Furillo guy for a couple of hours? "Hi, I'm Ed Furillo, vice president of sexual harassment at Sony, Eugene. Tickle your ass with a feather?"

So, with a gleam in my eye and mischief in my heart, I called my friend, Spanky Beckwirth, in Van Nuys, arranged for a place to stay, packed my only suit, gassed up the old 4Runner and headed south.

I must tell you that NAMM was everything I thought it would be and . . . less. It took up the whole of the L.A. Convention Center . . . a great big mountain of bullshit under a glass and steel roof . . . a veritable orgy of ass-kissing, back slapping, hype and bad food that seemed to go on and on forever. And that was just the electronics exhibit area . . . a place that I shall, from now on, refer to as Digital Hell. Let me be your Dante for a bit and take you on an abbreviated tour of the highlights (if you can call them that) of my journey.

EMU - In the Belly of the Beast

In the middle of the exhibition floor stood the great, white tent that enshrined the wares of EMU, it's portal guarded by a gorgeous young Amazon. I picked my way through the crowd and stood before her smiling. "Hi, Ed Furillo, vice president of sexual harassment at Sony, Eugene."

A blank stare . . . Silence.

Now, I'm not a bad looking guy. Some of the women I know even think I'm attractive . . . in an odd sort of way . . . but, standing beneath that young woman's gaze, I felt like an ugly, old troll . . . a derelict, seeking alms at the gates of Camelot.

"Bullshit!" I said to myself. Bent but unbroken I went inside.

Within the great tent, things got no better for me. It was a long, dimly lit and claustrophobic space that reminded me of the hold on a Roman galley . . . like in the movie, Ben Hur. Where I expected to see slaves at the oars, I saw, instead, young people connected to little black boxes . . . LEDs flashing in the dim light. The loud music, bad lighting and close quarters made me feel dizzy and nauseous. Staggering, I reached out to steady myself and bumped into a young automaton wearing headphones. I excused myself but he didn't hear, see or feel me. I stumbled out of the tent into the light and spaciousness of the exhibit hall where, after a few moments, I regained my composure. "This adventure is certainly getting off on the wrong foot," I thought. So, I took my leave of EMU, a company named after a large, flightless bird . . . and made a mental note to beat the crap out of my Proteus when I got home.

EVENT - Love Finds Mister Analog

The openness and relative calm of the Event pavilion was a refreshing contrast to the oppressive atmosphere of EMU. The folks at Event were quite pleasant and accommodating . . . and, best of all . . . these guys made speakers and microphones! Here, midst all the digital mayhem, I had found artifacts of my analog reality. The smooth, grey surfaces of the 20/20 "bi-amped" speakers were a substantial reminder of the familiar, everyday world I had left behind.

Then, there were the three sisters. . . Darla, Gina and Layla . . . The Supremes of digital audio adapters. Were inanimate objects ever so beautifully named? Newly aglow with love and good will, I looked down adoringly upon Layla, the youngest of the sisters, lying seductively in her display case and crooned in a low whisper . . . .

Layla . . .
You got me on my knees
Layla . . .
I'm begging of you please
Layla
Darling, won't you ease my worried mind

All was right, once again, in Retro World and, Analog, feeling youthful and replenished, moved on to experience whatever wonders and glories lay ahead.

ENSONIQ - PARIS When It Fizzles

Ensoniq is the home of PARIS, the Pro Audio Recording Integrated System . . . a group of electronic components that, taken together, will provide me with "everything I need to make beautiful music well into the next century."

The basic unit comes bundled three different ways . . . the most expensive of which retails for $3895.00. Then, there are add-on modules for input, output, ADAT, SMPTE and AES/EBU that list for about five hundred bucks a pop. So, I'm looking at almost seven Gs for a top-of-the line unit, dressed out to the nines, that includes everything except a crusty baguette, a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothchild and Catherine Denueve.

Kiss my ass!

For seven thousand bucks I could fly to the real Paris . . . not some half-assed acronym . . . but the city of light and substance, over there in France . . . I could spend at least a month, living in luxury, eating great food, drinking barrels of wine, getting laid three times a week and still have money left over to fix the busted input on my Porta Studio.

Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, mother fucker?

*MIDIMAN - Let's Get Small

The MidiMan booth was a small area devoted to small equipment. The tiny sample of miniature gear that I saw, scattered around the display, seemed of practical utility to both digital and analog applications alike. Also, the boys and girls at MidiMan seemed to have something that a great many of the digital heavyweights lacked . . . a sense of humor! The Midimen and women give us an apparatus called The Flying Cow . . . Fucking wonderful! Drowning in a sea of ponderous acronyms, suffocating in an deluge of alphabet soup, up to my eyeballs in XR16s, DR32s, MF64s and BS Plusses, I washed ashore in the Land of the Flying Cow.

I laughed . . . . . . . . and was saved!

I like small companies. Small companies usually stay afloat by providing a service or thing that nobody has thought of yet . . . or by making or doing what everybody is making or doing, but making or doing it better than anyone else. I'm not exactly sure what a Flying Cow is supposed to do but, in my short visit to NAMM, I didn't see anything remotely similar in appearance, function, or humorous appeal.

MidiMan also makes a digital audio card, called the DMan 2044. I guess nobody's perfect. What caught my attention, however, was the unit's lack of extraneous doo-dads. No expensive boon-doggles here. No digital I/O either. Just four lovely "ins" and four delightful "outs" all in glorious analog.

Maybe there is a God!

CAKEWALK - Help! I've Been Shot!

I was hungry and tired by the time I stumbled into the Cakewalk encampment. The endless bullshit barrage was beginning to wear pretty thin by that time and I was in a foul and hostile mood. I walked up to the lady at the welcome desk and . . . shit! SHE PULLED A GUN ON ME! "Please, don't let me die here, so far from home, amidst all these digital dickheads" I prayed. "Dear God, I'm being gunned down . . . not by some jealous husband, not in a gangsta shootout, but by Cakewalk, a company I've been supporting since back in the DOS days!"

Taking a closer look, I realized that what she was pointing at me wasn't a pistol but a bar code reader. I wasn't being killed. My Ed Furillo identity tag was being scanned! I was being processed like a loaf of bread at the grocery store. In the blink of an eye, I'd gone from being a murder victim to a depersonalized object.

Fear . . . relief . . . rage.
Fear . . . relief . . . rage.

This emotional trinity coursed through my consciousness at the speed of light. I stood there, fists clenched, heart pounding, indifferent to my surroundings. I was beginning to lose it. I wanted to reach out and strangle that . . . . . . . .

Needless to say, I didn't kill anyone at Cakewalk that day. In a matter of minutes my pulse returned to normal , the pounding in my head subsided to a dull ache and I went and found a much needed seat, with my fellow bread loaves, and waited to watch the Cakewalk . . . Pro Audio . . . version 7. . . demonstration.

A few minutes into Tom Swift and his "gee whiz, ain't this shit cool" pitch, I began to lose interest and drifted off. I started thinking about an old girlfriend of mine, back in New York . . . Minda Schwartz from Bayside. Minda had a cheerleader personality and a beautifully proportioned body, stretched on a compact, sinewy frame. Minda, however, didn't like her body. She always used to complain that her tits were too small and I always used to try to reassure her . . . "no, baby, your tits are perfect." But Minda was having none of that and went out and got herself silicon implants. One day she's sporting these sweet, little handfuls of mammary tissue and the next she's got hooters the size of watermelons, that looked like stage props and felt like tupperware serving bowls. I was completely turned off and, from that day, could never really get it up again for dear, sweet, top-heavy Minda.

Cakewalk Pro Audio reminds me a whole lot of Minda Schwartz. Where there was once an attractive MIDI application, beautiful in its naked simplicity, there now exists a program with great big plastic tits, six inch spiked heels, nylon stockings and a garter belt. I know . . . a lot of guys really get stiff for that crap . . . but not me. . . . . . Well, hardly ever! . . .OK . . .Fuck you! . . . so I like big tits and all that Fredrick's of Hollywood stuff, too. . . but, software doesn't raise my woody. Catherine Deneuve, on the other hand . . .

The afternoon's downward spiral into sex and violence left me with a nicotine craving the size of Nebraska. (I choose Nebraska arbitrarily, not for any pejorative reason. Feel free to substitute the state of your choice.) So, I left Cakewalk and the rest of Digital Hell . . . to find a place to have a smoke.
..
..
.
...
Later that day, I ran into an old friend . . . Dan Brown. Dan and I used to write songs together, back when I lived in L.A.. None of the stuff we wrote ever got published . . . and that, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing . . . as most of our songs were pathetic shit that didn't deserve to see the light of day. That didn't stop Dan and me, however, from inflicting them on friends, lovers, relatives and innocent bystanders at parties and other social occasions.

Dan was there showing Toro Albanez guitars in the musical instrument hall. I sat down with him for a while and he regaled me with stories of his five kids . . . and how he and Spanky Beckwirth would run into each other, from time to time, and get misty-eyed remembering back when the three of us, Dan, Spanky and I, would play a game that "sorta resembled golf" out at Woodley.

We sat there and talked like that for about fifteen minutes and then . . . it was time for Dan to get back to work and time for me to be moving on.

Lighter of heart and spirit, I spent the rest of that day cruising the aisles of musical instruments in a land thousands of light years removed from the robotic intensity of Digital Hell. It was a land of guitars and saxophones . . . a land of sheet music . . . a land where percussion instruments of every shape, size, and ethnic origin rang out in happy, rhythmic chaos. It was a land of brass and woodwinds. It was . . . ANALOG HEAVEN!!!!!

With the day drawing to a close, I stopped and thought about all those crazy mother fuckers down there in the bowels of Digital Hell, who were so busy sucking each other off . . . virtually, of course . . .they didn't seem to know or care that what they were doing had little or nothing to do with the "making" of music.

And how could they know? Blinded by their success and isolated by their arrogance, they truly lack a means of understanding the wonders and mysteries of musical creation.. Sure, they could capture a musical performance, dick with it in a zillion different ways, bend it to their wills, and process it onto the medium du jour. Yes, they could synthesize a reasonable facsimile of a trumpet . . . but they can't synthesize the heart and soul of a Louis Armstrong to power it. With enough processing power and storage space, they can come up with a Steinway that might sound good enough to fool the great Rubenstein. Rubenstein would know, however, when he sat down to play, that what lay under his hands wasn't broken trees and elephant ivories but a Frankenstein, fashioned of cold, impersonal, electronic bits and pieces, devoid of all the analog intangibles that are so essential to creating music of any kind. I felt like running back down, into that digital black hole and shouting, at the top of my lungs . . . "IT'S THE MUSIC, STUPID!!!!"

But why should they care? It was, after all, a convention of music marketers. There probably wasn't a real musician in the lot. What was I expecting? I expected to have a little fun and I had that. I also had my mind fucked, my heart broken and my eyes opened. That was enough for one day. It was time to go home.

On my way back, I stopped in Medford to see my sister, Grace. When I told Grace that I had been to NAMM she just looked up at me with her sad, grey, analog eyes and said, "I thought you were against the war, dear."

This is Mister Analog, wishing you peace, prosperity and music, music, music.

Copyright - Philip Cody - 1998
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Philip Cody
pcody@zookini.com
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The Analog Zone

Wed, 01 Apr 1998 00:00:00 GMT

It's Friday afternoon. You're home by yourself . . . as usual. The UPS guy has just dropped off a three by five foot box of God-knows-what. The return address on the shipping label reads "SteinWalk On-Line Entertainment." You scratch your foggy noggin, trying to remember what you might have ordered that could possibly be so big. You drag the box out of the front hall into the middle of the living room and hastily slit the taped parcel open. Voila! IT'S SIX MILLION PLASTIC CHEETOS! You begin to wonder, why on earth SteinWalk would be sending you all these plastic morsels when, deep down in the sub-oceanic trenches of your brain, a little light goes on . . . and, slowly, its message reaches the surface of your consciousness: Ass hole! Look in the Cheetos . . . Ass hole! It's buried under all those Cheetos . . .

And so, you begin doing a tentative breast stroke through a sea of white, plastic bits, being careful not to get them all over the living room, but the little fuckers stick to the hair on your arms, adhere to your eyelids, and get sucked into your mouth. One blocks off your left nostril. Blinded and suffocating you keep swimming ever downward into the cardboard abyss until your hand touches something hard. You feel around a bit. Recognition dawns. Inside that big box . . . is another box! Using both hands now, you feel around the perimeter of the object and slowly, ever so slowly, begin lifting your treasure into the light of day. You breach the surface, sending a blizzard of poly-styrene bits all across the living room. Wiping the last, insidious particles from your eyes, you look down to see . . . SteinWalk On-Line Entertainment's

"Babe-In-A-Box."

Babe-In-A-Box! Of course! How could you have possibly forgotten? It's only been on back order for the past eleven months. Remember the Virtual Vixens Web site? Remember filling out the order form? Remember the 350 bucks you used to have? There it is, Pal . . . neatly wrapped in black, purple and gold with a picture of a half naked, Virtual Vixen beckoning beneath the shrink wrap.

You trundle your precious cargo through the dark recesses of your cave into that black pit you call your "office." It's little more than a large closet, isn't it? Still, somewhere beneath the Coke cans, Subway wrappers, mountains of printed forms and dirty underwear, there hums the brand new Pentium VII, 1200 megahertz C-P-fucking-U, that makes your insignificant, analog life seem worth while. Your hands tremble and your mouth goes all gooey as you remove the outer wrapper. So, genius . . . don't just stand there drooling all over yourself! What's in the Box?

The first item out of the container is a small apparatus that looks like a miniature jai alai cesta with a cable attached. Next are what seem to be two alligator clips at the end of a y-shaped chord. The next item is obviously a pair of goggles followed by what can only be described as a metal yarmulke of some kind. Then there are four, neat parcels of various sized cables, a control unit, a pair of headphones, Quick Start Guide, registration card, instruction manual, a slip of pink paper with phone numbers for tech support, and three CD ROMS. One CD is the main program disk. The two other CDs contain, as the labels tell us, Bonus Babes II and III. You slut! You low-life, cheating mother fucker! I hope, for your sake, that virtual babe number one doesn't find out about babes two and three.

OK stud . . . it's time to put this mess together. A diagram in the Quick Start Guide shows you that the control unit gets attached to your PC via a serial port. The control unit, itself, has four ports . . . labeled A through D. The jai alai cesta gets plugged into port A. The alligator clips go to port B, the skull cap to port C and the goggles to port D. The headphones plug into a mini-jack on the side of the controller. You unravel the AC chord and plug it into a wall receptacle. You power up your PC, insert the Program disk and with a couple of clicks, your Babe-In-A-Box software is installed.

It's 6:15. You decide to freshen up before heading off on your date with digital desire. You shower, shave, slick back what little hair you have and slather on a generous amount of aftershave. You slip into a white, terry-cloth robe your ex-wife says makes you look like Moby Dick. Fuck her! Tonight, you're a shining mountain of LUV! Tonight, you're a towering iceberg of lust . . . on a collision course with a Titanic of virtual tits and ass. Tonight, you are The Man. Tonight, you are

El Gato!

The skull cap and headphones clip together and fit snugly on your head. You take one alligator clip and attach it to your left nipple. Ouch! The right nipple is next. Then . . . . you place your genitals into the jai alai thing and secure it with two little snaps. Hey, El Gato . . . it looks pretty spacious in there. The goggles complete your ensemble. Standing there, in the middle of that small room, attached to all that perverse hardware, you look more like a demented puppet rather than a potential love god. A Kodak moment from Hell. Nonetheless, you manage to waddle over to your chair and plop yourself down. You lift your goggles and double click the Babe icon on the Win2000 desktop. Goggles down. Lights up. New age funk in the "cans." The Babe-In-A-Box welcome screen and . . . . . . . .

Within the labyrinth of programming instructions that make up the Babe-In-A-Box application, there dwells a tiny fragment of broken code. As I understand it, this could be a misplaced comma or the letter "l" mistakenly typed in for the number "1". Whatever it is, this insect of misinformation lies hidden and dormant. At startup time, the Babe program looks to see what kind of video adapter is controlling the monitor display. It finds an AGX66 driver and, in response, scans its long list of instructions until it finds the appropriate line or lines of code to send back. In this case, it finds the lines containing the broken bits and tells our little buggy friend to wake up and get to work. The bug goes out and carries its message, not to the display adapter, as it should, but to a voltage regulator inside the Babe-In-A-Box controller module. The message is interpreted as " re-route all incoming electrical current to port A." So, the obedient little regulator sends 117 volts of electricity through port A and up the wire that's attached to your di . . . Oh NO!

KA-BLAAMMMM!!!!

When you come to, you're lying on your back looking up at the ceiling. Your vision is blurry, your head aches and your entire body is numb. It's hard to breath. You can smell barbeque. Barbeque? You look down to see the blackened cocktail frank that used to be your pecker and you scream. Mercifully, you pass out.

You regain a semblance of consciousness a few minutes later and manage to crawl back to your desk. With the little strength you have left, you reach up to where the phone should be. It's still there. Thank God! You drag the phone off the desk onto the floor. Next to the phone you find the pink slip of paper with the numbers for SteinWalk tech support. With great difficulty you begin punching in the number . . . 1-800 . . .

Moron! DIAL 911!
Listen to me, goddammit! 911!
A nine and two fucking ones!

The phone on the other end of the line starts ringing and the last thing you hear is an attractive, recorded voice, saying . . . "Welcome to SteinWalk Online Entertainment. Our office hours are from 9AM to 6PM, Eastern standard time. If you would like to leave a message for a support technician push 'one' now."

Then . . . everything goes dark.

You don't seem to be breathing anymore. It's probably safe to assume that you're dead. Sprawled out on the floor of your virtual love nest, it's quite obvious that you won't be getting laid again . . . ever. You lie there, silent and unmoving, like a sorry-assed broken blimp, little more than road-kill on the digital superhighway. There isn't anybody going to come along, push "alt-ctrl-del" and reboot your miserable existence. It's over. Finito. Requiescat In Pace. If you run into Elvis, say hi for me. Get an afterlife.

* *

Alas, poor dickhead . . . he was one of us, Horatio. A mote in the celestial eye. A lonely and insignificant traveler who's made his last trip. A lost soul who has immigrated from a place of digital clarity, exactitude, and boundless promise to a world of dirty fingernails, frustration and death . . . known as . . .

The Analog Zone!!!

This is Mister Analog, bidding you peace, prosperity . . . and safe sex!!!!

Copyright - Philip Cody - 1998
pcody@zookini.com