Pitchfork has been doing a weekend series where they commission reviews of older albums, featuring an eclectic mix of genres, artists, and selections. In a strange bit of synchronicity with my last post, this weekend they covered Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, a solo album released right after Steely Dan released Gaucho and broke up. It’s a great review, and adds a lot of color to the album I wasn’t aware of. There are several classics on this album: IGY, New Frontier, and the title track are all equal to any of Steely Dan’s best output, while some others are a fraction of that quality. The Nightfly was one of the first ten CDs I bought in the late 80’s—I already had several Steely Dan albums on cassette and I decided I wasn’t going to buy stuff I already owned. Right after this, both Fagen and Becker went dark for a couple of decades, and I didn’t reconnect with their later output.
I’m sitting in front of our living room hi-fi system, listening to a used vinyl copy of Aja by Steely Dan on the turntable I brought back from the dead. The turntable itself is a Technics SL-0033, a really nice midrange deck with automatic start and stop. It’s playing through a Denon head unit I saved from the side of the road (really, no kidding), a pair of Mission bookshelf speakers—also saved from the side of a different road, on a different day—and a KLH subwoofer saved from my parents’ basement. I’d like a little more treble response out of the high-end; Aja is an excellent reference record to test out sound, and the high frequencies are too muddy for my taste. I can’t adjust the subwoofer frequency cutoff like I can with the Polk unit in the den, this being a lower-end brand. I turned the Loudness feature on and jacked the treble up, and that made a little bit of a difference, but still not quite where I want it. There is another subwoofer gathering dust in Mom’s basement; I’ll check to see if the circuitry is adjustable, and maybe that one will find its way back to Maryland.
Following up on the thinking I was doing about my old iPhone the other day, I used the email address assigned to the basement server to create a new Apple account, and used that to sign into the phone. This way the two machines were happy to talk with each other, and it didn’t fuck anything up on my current iPhone (using the same email address tells Apple you want to mirror the two devices, so you wind up with apps on the old phone that don’t work and no room left to add music). Once I got it connected and loading music, one of the other things I wanted to do was see if I could add it to the list of devices shared in my iCloud account, so that I could see it with Location Services. Because the iPhone is only on OS 12.5.8, it took a bit of finessing, but I was able to get it in the list and visible on my newer phone. With 64GB of storage, it’s a very fancy iPod, but it’s free and it works, so I’ll keep filling it with tunes.
This site TOTALLY takes me back: Spelunkr.tv is a set of 34 themed channels playing shows from the 80’s and 90’s: cartoons, Star Trek reruns, wrestling shows, Bob Ross, Friday Night Videos… and you can’t change the channel. What’s on is on, and you watch what you get. All I need now are a stack of Oreos, a glass of milk, and a spot on the couch next to the dog.
Man, I could not be happier for these kids. Baltimore REPRESENT
Over the last couple of weekends, I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to get an outside wireless access point set up at the house. Earlier this year Jen bought a BirdBuddy and struggled to get it to connect quickly or reliably; we get great reception and all rooms of the house from one router, but because our house is covered in thick sheets of Eisenhower-era aluminum siding, the effect is that of a Faraday cage: wireless signal doesn’t penetrate the outside of the house easily. I’ve done a couple of experiments with various off the shelf plugin repeaters but none of them are able to extend the signal past the back door, so I decided I was going to have to get serious and buy an outside unit. In order to make this work, I knew I was going to have to employ what is called power over ethernet, where the network signal and power both run on the same wire. This avoids having to run an extension cord outside, installation of an outside electrical box, or other dumb/expensive solutions.
Thus began a tumble down the rabbit hole of trying to find something that worked. The first one I bought was the same brand as our TP-Link router. But it came with a special name, which basically meant it was a commercial level unit which required the installation of a special app on my phone and all sorts of other nonsense to get it to work. I have an aversion to installing random janky security nightmare apps just to accomplish what should be a simple web-based task, so that unit got packaged back up and returned.
The next one I tried was another name brand, which got a bunch of good ratings online. I unboxed it, set the whole thing up, and found that the little power over ethernet injector that came with it was dead. So I had Amazon ship me a $10 injector, and when I plugged that in, I found that the repeater was still dead. This was really getting frustrating. I boxed that one up, returned it, and found a third unit with one of those word-jumble Amazon names that actually wound up being cheaper than the first two. While I wasn’t as impressed with the weather resistance of its design, I did a test run inside the house and was pleased to see that it powered right up. I mounted it outside under the porch and configured it via its built-in web interface, which is As Things Should Be.
Then can the next step: getting Jen’s BirdBuddy to see it and work with it. In order to change the network access point on the camera, you basically have to reset the whole thing. I also found out that it does not like 5GHz frequency, so I had to shut that down on the router. After doing that and connecting it to the new access point, we found that nothing had changed: the network indicator still spun and spun when we requested a livestream. I’m thinking that there may be something wrong with the BirdBuddy itself, but I will say it is nice to finally have the outside access point. It’s within line of sight of the garage, which means I don’t have to walk back into the house to load a website. More research on the BirdBuddy is required.
In the living room, I’ve been assembling a simple entertainment center based around an old Denon head unit and turntable I’ve had kicking around. We took the old IKEA cabinet from my rowhome in Canton and put some new legs on it, which raised it up off the floor and gave it a more mid-century modern feel to fit in with the rest of our furniture. I hooked up a pair of bookshelf speakers I scored at a yard sale and one of dad’s old subwoofers underneath to get good sound. The turntable is a really nice Technics unit from the mildew house we went through years ago, and I splurged on a new needle for it. After doing a test spin, I found that the signal going to the head was super weak. It turned out the Denon did not have a photograph preamp, so I had to pick one of those up from the jungle site. Once that was in, I spun a copy of Steely Dan’s Aja, and it sounds really good. Next, I had to find a DC power unit for dad’s circa 1993 portable Kenwood CD player. I was able to find one in the pile of orphan power units at work and got that hooked up. Then I put a separate cable in for an iPod, and with that, we’ve got a working functional sound system in the living room.
Last week I drove north to go look at some inexpensive Insta360 cameras, which were being sold for $10/ea via Marketplace. These were first-gen units which happen to be extremely small, with the drawback being a short recording time: 30 seconds at regular speed, or up until the internal 8GB card filled on timelapse. They were cheap, so I bought four, and charged them up when I got home. Getting them to mount to my laptop took some doing; I had to reformat their internal drives and do a firmware update, and was able to get them to connect reliably. After doing some trickery I was able to install an older version of the Insta360 app on my old iPhone 6, but couldn’t get the cameras to sync with the phone, so there’s no way to update things like their internal clocks, default recording modes, or other settings. Thankfully though, they do record and hold a battery charge, and I was able to do some recording with them, then use the Insta360 app on my laptop to edit and export decent-quality video. They’ll be good for short recordings or time-lapse shots hanging off the back of the truck, and if they fall off I won’t be too upset.
All the good aliens have left the planet. And now this news. Fair winds and clear skies, Dolly.
I took the girls to see The Odyssey on Sunday afternoon, and my ears are still ringing. The movie itself was beautiful, and I left the theater with more questions than answers—which is something I appreciate. I wanted to read everything I could about the original story, Nolan’s commentary on the direction he took, and some of the reviews by people I respect. Every one of the cast did some of their best work, and it was a pleasure to see some favorites bring it (Leguziamo as Eumaeus was amazing; Pattinson was punchable, and I was happy to see the beautiful Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, I don’t care what the white supremacists say).
However, the sound was absolutely deafening. And when I mean deafening, I mean seeing-GWAR-in-1992-at-Hammerjacks-with-all-the-levels-at-10-on-the-soundboard LOUD. At the climactic battle, I had to plug both of my ears. Whoever mixed this movie needs to have some remedial education on how to actually hear actors speak their lines. When I was looking at the showtimes, there was a separate theater which featured on-screen captions, and when I offered it to Jen, we both said, “Nah…”
Now I’m thinking that was a mistake. It would have been nice to understand the first 10 minutes of dialogue, but after that I was mostly able to separate words from the BLLLEAAAAAAAAHHHHHH when I started reading lips. For years I’ve thought that the sound system in our house was lousy, even though I have a center channel speaker pointed directly at the couch, but I’m beginning to think that the failure to hear and comprehend modern dialogue is not my fault.
This is Never Enough, by The Cure. This appeared on a comp album they put out called Mixed Up, where they had a bunch of different artists re-imagine earlier work, and was an extended version of a new single. My roommate bought the album and I had this one track on heavy repeat back in the day. All of the current streaming versions are different than the one I remember—the one on the cassette was a little shorter and simpler, and I like that one best.
Ooof, this is a tough one. Mark Lanegan (of the Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, and an extensive solo career) did a cover of Alice In Chains’ Nutshell about six years ago: a song about addiction—but really, what AiC song isn’t about addiction? He dedicated it to the memory of Layne Staley and Mike Starr, who both overdosed at different times. Lanegan and Staley were good friends, and Lanegan was also an addict, and was apparently clean—but died of unknown causes two years after recording this.
He’s singing in a completely different voice here—I didn’t recognize him at all without the rough growl, and his clean voice is achingly beautiful. I’m always wary of pedal steel, but his accompanist is masterful—she’s just perfect. What a beautiful tribute.
Listening to a podcast this weekend, I heard a mention of Wire by U2 featured in a first-season episode of Miami Vice scoring a nighttime car chase, and the host said that it was the most 1985 thing he’d ever heard or seen. I would agree. I have long loved this song, my favorite off an album full of fantastic tracks, and it appears on every driving playlist I’ve ever assembled—at the risk of inspiring a speeding ticket. Now I’m binging the first season of the series (available on Tubi) and it is totally taking me back to middle school.
Apparently they don’t play it much live, which is a crime; this is a clip from a 1985 performance during the Unforgettable Fire tour.