Viraj's Weblog

Here is a really good Frontline on the cheap airline industry.

Here is a new song. I played around with some Ableton distortion effects on this one (notice the static drum track). The song changes quite a bit, probably because I spent weeks on it. Still it's pretty cool.

I wasn't sure what to expect seeing the trailers for Shutter Island portraying a Scorsese movie as a horror. I just knew I had to see it because it was Scorsese.

What made this film even more interesting is that I just read My Lobotomy and Great and Desperate Cures, both excellent books on psychosurgery, or lobotomies to the layman. In Shutter Island, the term 'transorbital lobotomy' is thrown around as if describing a monster. It's set in the 1950's, when indeed such surgery was mainstream even to the point of doctors like Walter Freeman making house calls to do them. I especially liked the reference to there being 2 psychiatry frames of thought during this time: psychosurgery and therapy/pharmacology. You had one camp that felt physical changes were needed to cure people (e.g. lobotomies), and another where it was thought Freudian therapy would work. Freudian therapy soon meshed with pharmacology, and it has been brought up many times whether drug treatment is just a "chemical lobotomy" (quote from Walter Freeman).

The film also mentions Chlorpromazine (Thorazine) which was the first of the pharmacological treatments for mental disorder, making the movie scientifically convincing. That's one thing that that impressed me about this, just how well it was done . I mean, it is Scorsese after all, and you can tell. Most scenes are just perfect in all aspects, from the music, acting, camera work, and overall immersion. I wasn't sure how Scorsese would do dream scenarios, but this movie is impressive how well it conveys hallucinatory drugs and withdrawal. I guess DiCaprio was made to play this ever since Basketball Diaries.

Scorsese's films all include some kind of meditation on violence. It's not so much that he glorifies it, but he portrays it as a human disease that we all suffer from. There's a short dialogue between two people that realize this in the film, and you can't help but think it is the director's view on the human condition expressed in a few sentences.

The unrealistic part of the movie is the idea that an institution would work so hard during this era to cure someone without resorting to the quick-fix lobotomy. A masterful plan is made to cure a patient, and it is unconvincing that such a plan would ever really be employed. In those days, an ice pick through the eye socket was much less expensive.

And that ice pick does come, after all, glimmering in the sun. There is a good quote at the end, "Is it better to die a good man or live life as a monster?"

Another interesting quote from Eating Animals spoken by a factory farmer. This is perhaps the best argument for factory farms I've heard:

I've told you the drawbacks because I'm trying to be up-front with you. But in fact, we've got a tremendous system. Is it perfect? No. No system is perfect. And if you find someone who tells you he has a perfect way to feed billions and billions of people, well, you should take a careful look. You hear about free-range eggs and grass-fed cattle, and all of that's good. I think it's a good direction. But it ain't gonna feed the world. Never. You simply can't feed billions of people free-range eggs. And when you hear people talking about small farming as a model, I call that the Marie Antoinette syndrome: if they can't afford bread, let them eat cake. High-yield farming has allowed everyone to eat. Think about that. If we go away from it, it may improve the welfare of the animal, it may even be better for the environment, but I don't want to go back to China in 1918. I'm talking about starving people.

Granted, it's a bit one-sided. Of course people could stop eating meat, but the idea of feeding billions any type of food that they can afford is going to result in large-scale factories of some sort. Quality is going to suffer, and problems like long-term effects of genetic engineering of foods will arise, but to feed the population of the world, family farms likely won't cut it. It's a huge demand for cheap food, and that demand grows with the population.

Do you think family farms are going to sustain a world of ten billion?

Step your mind into a crowded elevator, an elevator so crowded you cannot turn around without bumping into (and aggravating) your neighbor. The elevator is so crowded you are often held aloft. This is a kind of blessing, as the slanted floor is made of wire, which cuts into your feet.

After some time, those in the elevator will lose their ability to work in the interest of the group. Some will become violent; others will go mad. A few, deprived of food and hope, will become cannibalistic.

There is no respite, no relief. No elevator repairman is coming. The doors will open once, at the end of your life, for your journey to the only place worse (see: PROCESSING).

The quote could be talking about overpopulation, but it's referring to the use of 'battery cages' by chicken farmers. I'm reading Eating Animals, a wittily written book on, well, eating animals.

Another good quote about KFC:

Formerly signifying Kentucky Fried Chicken, now signifying nothing, KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history.

Heh, reminds me of an old KFC commercial, where Kernel Sanders tries to cater to 'urban' audiences by yelling "Booyah!"

Here is a new song. I spent almost the whole weekend on it and got some blisters in the process.

The drums are created using Addictive Drums with my electronic drum set, which has some excellent drum samples. MIDI drums are nice because you can easily correct errors. However, I found when doing rolls and such, it's hard to get the analog feel.

I spent a lot of time trying to get the bass right, and I think I created about 8 different versions I had to dump to my ipod and then listen to in my car. My car has a crappy stereo, but it's where I listen to most of my music. If it doesn't sound good there, I need to improve it. The first versions had really bad bass that killed my speakers. The plain drums lacked kick, so I added an 808 kick, but the mix of that and the real drum kick was too much. So I put a compressor on the 808 kick, which sidechains from the real drum kick. This makes the drum kick lower the volume of the 808 kick for a few microseconds. Then I added a compressor to the bassline, using input from the 808 kick. That lets the 808 quickly bring down the volume of the bassline. So the real drum kick compresses the 808 kick which compresses bassline .

I've found the real time spent in all of this is getting it sounding right. Mastering is definitely an art.

The video for this song will be a collection of time lapse videos. Be sure to keep an eye on my YouTube channel!