This evening Sam, my computer, forgot he had some 250-odd MB of memory left and refused to save anything. I restarted, and suddenly everything was wrong. The dock was huge and immobile and didn’t hold any programs I use with regularity. The icons on the desktop were out of whack. TextEdit was correcting my spelling, even though I’d told it not to. The clock was reading military time, and the calendar was all the wrong colors. Apparently, Sam’s preferences got rezzed. I have no idea how.
This engenders a distinctly different feeling of virtual space. My immediate space — the files on the desktop, the interfaces of programs — feels fuzzy and nonsensical. Meanwhile, my blog and anything else I connect to on remote servers still looks clear, with preferences just as I left them.
Sam suffered a bump while I was on the road, and now has a skewed CD drive which looks like a misshapen jaw. Maybe that has something to do with it. Or yeah, heh — it could be something to do with how I opened him up today to try to fix the problem…
But something about it feels more sympathetic. After the constant input of the conference last week, my brain isn’t allowing me to save anything to memory either. I’m sluggish. I start doing one task and end up doing two others and then lose track of all three. What with
People in my department talk about “distributed cognition” — the process of using your environment and the people in it to think. Sam and I are currently going through distributed amnesia. I mean, I really feel it. Like a Borg I feel it. It doesn’t matter that he’s the dumb partner in this pairing; with the end of the semester upon us, his memory is just as important to my success as mine is. Right now, with all his broken shortcuts, it’s taking the two of us about three times as long as usual to find files.
Our brain is broken. Please bear with us.
The only thing my brain is open to right now is music. Wide, wide open. Manu Chao (“que voy hacer, je ne sais pas, que voy hacer, je ne sais plus, que voy hacer, je suis perdu, que hora son mi corazon,” “esperando a la ultima ola/ esperando a la ultima rola/ arriba la luna ohea!”), and David Byrne’s new album, and that Stereolab song, and the Van Hunt song they gave heavy rotation on KCRW (“I am dust/ blown away over the edge/ I’m already insane”) and Franz Ferdinand and
oh oh oh, tonight I had to put in my ear buds to make sure I wasn’t missing any of the instrumental lines of Bruce Haack’s song Electric To Me Turn (that’s an MP3, control-click to download, YOU MUST DOWNLOAD TO BE COOL) on this single shit-ass speaker Sam has. And yes, it has this sublime little bass line I’d never picked up before, one which would probably not be half so charming if the song were in any way remixed.
I will say it again, Haack was an unbelievable visionary. That it took the creative directors of the LA Symphony Orchestra until this year to recognize that music from the Final Fantasy series of video games might be worthy of performance is just another measure that demonstrates how far ahead of his time Haack was to be willing to explore electronic music the way it wanted to be explored.
Our generation has been waiting for this. We’ve been playing video game music out of context for years. My sisters and I used to tape music off the Nintendo to take with us on family trips so we wouldn’t miss it. (It’s great music for exploring new worlds, of course!)
There was a girl in the UVa YWW songwriting section a few years back who only did one thing — arrange video game music. People said, “That’s not music.” (I said Kiddo, it’s not like the game generates these songs, there’s a human being behind them; his name is Nobuo Uematsu, and you really shouldn’t be ripping him off without credit…) Bands upon bands have done covers of the Mario Bros. and Metroid themes.
Is this the year of the video game, or what? Seems not a day goes by that the mainstream media doesn’t do an article on them.
Oh, I am so not doing my work. Really? I can’t concentrate. At all.
