(no subject)

This story has been effecting me a lot since I heard it. I don't know any of the people who were involved in the party or who were killed, but some were friends of our neighbor this year out in the desert. They are peers, even if I never met them, burners who threw a party not unlike the kind that we love to throw, to have fun and dress up and dance and celebrate... How can you even begin to wrap your head around something so senseless?
I don't know what I can do to help, but just wanted to throw whatever love and condolences I can out to Sporkly and any other northwest burners who need it. It seems like so little.

***

My weekend wasn't nearly as productive as I'd wanted it to be. I hoped to get the house cleaned up, to work on music. Other than a lovely lunch with gunn, I barely moved on Saturday. Granted I was sore from the bout on Friday, but I thought I'd have a bit more motivation than I did. S4 came home from work bearing the Firefly box set and a bottle of wine, because he's the best. We consumed a bit of the first and all of the latter in surprisingly short order. That was lovely.
Board games and team meeting on Sunday. Good to hang out with djnoise again, outside of short hellos between sets at the club, though I am feeling the urge to go dancing again sometime soon. other than the bout, my last few weekends seem to have been pretty sedentary. I managed to get a load of laundry done, but no music.

I'm playing for the art opening in 12 days. Hope I'm ready.

random

My new MIDI controller came today. Yaaaay! It didn't come with a power supply, which is a little irritating, but I guess that's my deal for not reading the ebay entry well enough. I think it's USB powered anyway, and one of my many homeless AC adapters is probably the correct voltage, so not a huge deal. Prob'ly still worth it since I got it for about $30 below retail. It's tinier than I expected!

After a month of the swelling not really going down significantly on the finger I jammed at the February bout, I'm experimenting with taping it to keep it straight. This makes typing kind of lame and writing legibly nigh impossible, but I'm adapting pretty quickly. If it's still crappy after the final bout, I'll resign myself to going to the doctor.

Have a couple newer warehousey living space leads. Yay.

Hrm.

Okay.

So I'm getting stuff together to jam on for two hours for this art opening.

I have a question for the music folks out there. Or any of you geeks, really...

I've long claimed the operating assumption that using presets and canned beats to excess is, in essence, cheating. Notable exceptions hold, of course, like reiterating existing loops and samples to make something completely new (Zurround did this all the time, so does a lot of perfectly respectable hip hop and other electronic music, etc.), or altering something enough that you've made it your own (I love collage-based stuff like Negativland or Evolution Control Committee), or using something with such an existing camp value that it comes full circle (Trio using the default beat on the Casio Sk-1) But... what about came-with-the-software, plug-n-play, royalty-free jobs, and you're not using it as a scratch pad? I've always thought of that stuff like hostess snack cakes- they're quick, they're convenient, they're cheap, everyone knows what they taste like and they're readily available, but they sure as hell aren't something you'd serve at a restaurant and try to get away with having people think they're a fine dessert, you know? Not that they don't have uses and all, BUT.

Here's the thing.
If I have a musical/programming weakness, it's the beats. Not that I can't find a beat, or play on the beat, or know what I like in percussion, but I have a big ol' block when it comes to confidently creating beats I like from scratch. (The one weird exception to this seems to be nanoloop. I really enjoy programming short rhythmic stuff with nanoloop on the gameboy, but that gets limited in a couple of ways.) Otherwise, it's very picky and time consuming and very rarely are my rhythmic tracks anything I'm *proud* of, necessarily- I find them mostly functional at best. The flipside of this is that I can make melodic/harmonic bits that I like that fuse together right off the top of my head that I find reasonably interesting pretty reliably All The Time.

I got to thinking that maybe this is a weird, self imposed, snotty sort of mindfuck. Is it? If I use the occassional canned loop or preset in "my" music, would you still respect me the next day? Should I rightfully feel cheap and dirty, or is this my classical music snob upbringing rearing its head in a different format and I should just fuck it and quit being so damned uptight?

My best guess is that it's neither here nor there, and the real answer is kinda fuzzy. This feels similar to admitting to liking a "less cool" genre of music somehow, like just having to shout "yes, fuck you, sometimes I LIKE certain progressive trance tracks and dancing around my living room like a total moron, OKAY?" from a proverbial rooftop and just getting it overwith, or like that thing that Jj had with Dolly Parton, but maybe it's not.

Thoughts?