Dabble Babble

Category: Reflections

  • Wasting Precious Time or Why I Bought an Arturia Microfreak Instead of “Just Using the Computer”

    Helpful product warning. 2025

    Trigger Warning: What follows is a short meditation on why I bought the Arturia Microfreak synthesizer instead of just making music on my computer or not even bothering and listening to music somebody else made or not even getting out of bed in the first place.

    Once upon a time, no one had a phone in their pocket. When you left the house it was as much a mystery to others as to yourself where you might end up and whether or not you might return. I suppose it’s still a mystery if you’ll return, but at least now we’ll have footage and data about the tragedies you may or may not have encountered. That is, unless you turn your phone off or leave it at home.

    Madness, I know! Think of all the important marketing messages, misinformation, and scam calls you might miss!

    Grab your NASA blanket and follow me back to the 80s, way back to that hellscape of peace and quiet. Back to when I was eight years old and my grandmother’s sister—whose name I will not share to protect the dead—asked me what my goals were for the New Year. In retrospect, it was a strange question to ask an eight-year-old, but I replied very seriously, “I want to become a translator.” Apparently, I thought a year was a sufficient amount of time to achieve this goal. But, my not-so-great great-aunt was kind enough to disabuse me of the delusion.

    “What a waste of time. They’re just gonna have computers translate everything in the future.”

    I’ve always remembered that experience. Not because it dampened my mood about that goal or New Year’s goals in general—this not-so-great great-aunt wasn’t known for tact or even common sense. The experience stuck with me because of what it said about the world I was living in.

    Keep in mind, computers were basically expensive doorstops that could print a sentence like “Please don’t fart in the hallway”—if you work in an office you’ll understand the utility of that sentence—through a pre-MS Word software package that required you to essentially code the page. Safe to say the singularity wasn’t on the horizon. But she’d no doubt heard about the Terminator. She knew what’s up!

    My not-so-great great-aunt was expressing two basic ideas that have a lot of caché in America.

    First, that technology is basically magic and will solve all problems in space and time while you yawn, scratch your cheek, and press a button.

    Second, that nothing that can be done cheaper, faster, or by someone or something else is worth your doing! Remember, you’re busy! You’ve got an ass to sit on and space to stare into!

    I sometimes try to imagine this world. Clearly it’s some people’s utopia and there’s no app to send me there which tells me it’s worth the mental effort required. It’s a magical place where everything is done for you. You simply lay on your back somewhere doing nothing, saying nothing. Why would you need to speak? Robots can speak, after all. So why bother? All of your desires are catered to immediately anyway. You’re evolved. You’ve harnessed the power of tech to merge human and machine, to become something greater! Almost like a human black hole inhaling the universe and crushing it out of existence with the black nothingness deep inside you. Sounds awesome!

    But maybe you’re thinking, “Hold your horses, world-destroyer! What about fun?”

    You must be some kind of evolutionary reject who can’t understand that the marketing scam of false-convenience should rob you of all of life’s joys so that strangers can make money off of you. Hm.

    Microfreak on a desk. Photographed by me. 2025.
    Microfreak on a desk. Photographed by me. 2025.

    Fair enough, I admit it. I bought the Arturia Microfreak because I wanted to have fun. And worse than that, I don’t find trying to click nobs on a virtual synthesizer with a trackpad or mouse to be fun. In fact, when I sit in front of an actual computer, I feel like I’m at work and I keep having this paranoia that someone has farted in the hallway or was that the smell of someone eating over-boiled, low-quality eggs with their office door open?

    The Microfreak is also an aesthetic choice for me. I like the French company that produces the unit; the sounds of the presets are to my liking. The unit has an unusual flat keyboard that I’m pretty excited about, and it’s small enough and reasonably priced enough that if I decide to abandon my aspirations to make unstructured noise after a couple of months, it won’t take a lot of space and I won’t feel like I’ve bankrupted myself.

    I have yet to decided whether or not I’ll post tutorial videos or jams. I’m still trying to decide which seems to be the most quintessentially middle-aged behavior. But if I do either type of video, I’ll likely post them on my YouTube channel.

  • The Goodreads Challenge or Why We Even Read?

    Trigger warning: there are no photos in this post.

    I have a complicated relationship with Goodreads. Yes, it’s a nice way to make lists of books that I will emphatically refuse to acknowledge I’ll never read. It’s also a great way to see what other people who I currently know or previously knew are reading. It affords me the opportunity to think: Hm. That’s a surprise or yeah, that figures. I’m sure most of you are above that sort of thing.

    I don’t write reviews anymore, mostly because I peaked early with one of my very first book reviews. I made a one or two sentence comment about wishing there was a reality TV show in which a particular celebrity was made to read a particular book (fantasies about television shows and performance art installations that would never be funded are common for me).

    This review has been so successful—leading me at times to wonder if maybe this would make excellent TV— that every now and then, years later, a stranger likes the comment. Like everyone on social media, when I get a like, I reconsider my entire life path. Producer. Show-runner. It’s too much pressure. By the time the likes got to a total of around 8 or 9, I realized I probably couldn’t top this success. Even the writers of Mad Men knew when to quit! So, I retired from the role of Goodreads book critic. Still, it’s not the standard social media fare that inspires my conflicted feelings about the site. Likes, comments, and amateur literary crit are all fine with me, it’s those damn goals.

    What Qualifies As Reading?

    When you make the transition from Creeper spying on people’s reading choices or Aspirational List Maker to the boastful position of Goal Setter, the waters get a little murky.

    At first, it seems simple. Let’s say your screen name is Book Scooter. That name sucks, I hope that’s not your screen name. How about Emperor Bookington the 42nd to the 3rd power! Now that’s a name! Certainly worthy of the delusions of grandeur required to announce your plans to break Goodreads (and maybe the internet itself) by reading 365 books in 2025.

    But now you’ve got a problem your highness. What constitutes reading? Are you allowed to read with your ears? Or does the simple fact that this is both potentially pleasurable and time-saving strike it from the purity litmus of suffering required for bragging rights? Let’s say you come down resolutely on this issue. No, mine royal ears will NOT take in literary rambling.’Tis only my eyes that shall read, so sayeth the Emperor!

    But what about pages? Does a forty-page book of poetry have an equal status to Thomas Mann’s 700 pages of Magic Mountain? Come on Bookington, we all played the chapter book game in grade school to get our personal pan pizza certificates. The game is up!

    Maybe this doesn’t concern you. Maybe you take a broad general view of the whole thing and accept that long and short books will average out and these details are for mere reading mortals who will only manage 12 or fewer tomes across this coming calendar. What if you don’t finish the book? How many skipped chapters nullifies your read? And what about stuck together pages or reading while drowsy or when your mind wanders because well this part or that part of the book is just a tad over written and un-necessary. I mean did no one have an editor in the 19th century?

    Face it: your kingdom may not be based on lies exactly, but certainly there’s a thick layer of gloss obscuring the details. Nevertheless, isn’t the point personal satisfaction? congratulations? achievement?

    Reading Goals or Challenges Are Nice, but Why Are You Reading?

    Maybe you’re reading because it’s fun! Alright Emperor Bookington the 42nd to the 3rd power, you’re in it for the random and unfocused enjoyment of it all. I’d tell you to move on to a different website now because I absolutely can’t relate to that as a motivation for anything, but if fun is your game, you’ve probably already stopped reading this blog and now anyone still reading is having the uncomfortably awkward experience of reading my words to some other reader who isn’t even here.

    Sorry about that! I didn’t realize you were still here. You’re probably, like me, wondering why you read too! Sure you might have page count goals or book number goals, but that isn’t really the why. As the year comes to a close, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own habits of reading and how they form a kind of equation that’s needled its way into my subconscious bringing with it a lot of guilt and judgement (both for me and for the written word).

    As a kid, I walked the aisles of libraries and bookstores grabbing volumes with interesting artwork or exciting titles — this is probably why the algorithmic uniformity of titling that has all but overtaken the titles of articles and nonfiction works fills me with such profound boredom. I read randomly and unsystematically and my goal was never to master a topic or elevate my standing in a field of knowledge. In fact, I don’t know that I had a goal in that SMART goals, end of the year performance assessment, culture of self-improvement, list making and checking framework that is so much a part of nearly every aspect of American life these days.

    I just read stuff and mused about connections and necessarily I spent less time concerned with the arguments of experts and more time building my own narratives about the organization of the world and my place in it. I was a cosmological reader, and I think to some degree most children are. They have to be. This year, my reading goal or the intent behind my reading is to regain some of this control over the construction of my inner world through a less systematic and more organic reading which I’ll talk more about in future posts. Oh, and I will be beating Emperor Bookington’s book count!

  • More or less Brutalism

    or how to not let Pedantic Pete ruin your good time.

    It’s everywhere and all around you and at first you may not have noticed it. And when I say that you didn’t notice it, I don’t mean that you walked through your day blindly or that you never stopped to admire the way it looked. I’m not saying that you never had a feeling about it—a feeling that made you want to come back to that place, to that building.

    I don’t know when I first encountered Brutalist architecture, precisely because I didn’t realize as a kid that there was such a thing as architectural movements or that all these different buildings that felt both ancient and futuristic were part of a conversation between people thinking and talking and writing about how we organize our lives and building these massively cool buildings to manifest that conversation in concrete.

    I was living in Rhode Island when I first became aware that these buildings were part of something larger than their individual greatness. Several times a week as I headed eastward into Massachusetts, I’d drive under the Fall River Government Center on I-195. Here’s a better view of this magnificent building than you’ll get from a quick glance as you shoot, at speed, through the tunnel underneath it.

    Government Center is the City Hall for Fall River, Massachusetts. Photo created by: Kenneth C. Zirkel

    My Poor Parlance with Pedantic Pete

    I began to see Brutalism all around me. In the government buildings in Boston, on the campus of Brown University, in hotels and apartments buildings tucked away in the woods. I had made the mistake of sharing my re-categorizations of the buildings that occupied the landscape of my life with a friend of mine who I’ll call Pedantic Pete. The conversation would go something like this:

    Me: I saw this building north of Seekonk. I don’t know which town I was in exactly because I took a wrong turn up there, and it’s this really cool Brutalist building.

    Pedantic Pete: I know which one you mean. I wouldn’t really call that Brutalism.

    Me: It’s made out of concrete.

    Pedantic Pete: So, are parking garages Brutalist?

    Me: Oh, maybe?

    And then something very strange would happen. As he began to outline an academic definition of Brutalism and explain a series of authors he was aware of who would question my pedestrian judgement on the topic, his head would continue to expand. First his cheeks and then his forehead. His ears would pop inside out and a short string would drop down as the entire cranium—which wasn’t a cranium at all—revealed itself to be a purple balloon. I always assumed it was filled with helium because it floated upwards, and Pete would always grab onto the string in an attempt to keep his head. As you can imagine though, he was never able to bring his head back onto his shoulders or even slow his ascent. I would finally give up and just patiently watch him float off into the distance.

    After that I wouldn’t see him again for several days. Once he disappeared for over a month, and I hoped that he’d found a land where his particular brand of oxygen-sucking intellect might be appreciated. I imagined him sitting atop a gilded throne on a platform at the center of a room full of sleeping party guests in ill-fitting tuxedos and torn party dresses. The image hardly made sense, even to me! So, I did what we all do when we have a friend with a barely tolerable habit, I told myself this time was really it! No more! I would never speak to Pedantic Pete again!

    But, I was weak and very soon I was being educated about another building I liked and how that building, strictly speaking, did not fit the definition of Brutalism.

    In fairness, it wasn’t just Brutalism. Pedantic Pete is an expert on nearly everything. I’m sure you know the type, have probably sorely regretted opening your mouth at all, and maybe some of you have learned to simply pretend you don’t know about or appreciate anything at all.

    So, in honor of Pedantic Pete, here’s a great example of a more or less Brutalist building that I came to love in Fort Worth, Texas, designed by the architect Louis Kahn.

    Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Source: Library of Congress. Photo Contributed by Carol Highsmith.

    Soft Definitions and Fields of Admiration

    I prefer thinking about a building as more or less Brutalist. It’s a soft definition that includes as much feeling as thought. And that feeling for me is both ancient and futuristic as if the space opens up your view of time. It’s made of concrete and so has a color palette of greys and blacks and browns that you might have in rock.

    With all this in mind, I have begun to collect images of more or less Brutalist buildings that I have visited and a list of those that I hope to someday visit. From time to time, I’ll post about particularly spectacular examples. And when the topic comes up with Pedantic Pete, I remind him that I’m not talking about Brutalism. I’m talking about Brutalism more or less, which is in fact a field of admiration different from the academic notion of Brutalism.

    Brutalism more or less, as fields of admiration and not a field of study, is dominated by amateurs and fuckabouts. If you are an amateur or a fuckabout, welcome to my blog! And if you, like Pedantic Pete, have the one true gospel truth on any of the topics that I’ll write about, please don’t waste your genius on my comment section. Start yourself a Substack! I hear there’s money in it!