Contemplating everything everywhere with everyone
The week technology kicked my ass...
I am an enthusiastic adopter of technology in most aspects of my life, but when it comes to music I’ve always preferred a box with some guts strung across it or a tube with a few well-placed holes.
It all started with an off-hand comment. “Sure, I’ll teach you how to use a looper, and if you like, I can book you for the festival next fall.”
That’s the sort of thing my friend Rick Walker—innovative drummer, enthusiastic collector of instruments “played badly,” and organizer of the International Live Looping Festival—throws out casually. That’s the sort of challenge I receive very seriously.1
This challenge was especially welcome. I’ve been a musician all my life, and lately I’ve felt like I needed something new to tackle. Looping would take me back to my experimental roots after a long foray into bending my wandering brain into traditional jazz. So I sat down with Rick in his studio and learned how to use the workhorse of looping, a stompbox. Rick lent me one he wasn’t using, I went home and for the next couple of weeks, all sorts of sounds (most of them probably not what you would call “music”) issued forth from my PA.
Rick needed the box back, so I started to look around at options. I was particularly attracted to the idea of a single box, but I’ve always known that my feet don’t do what my brain tells them to do, so when I saw the recommendation for an app that only runs on iOS, I decided to check it out. We’re an Android household, but I had a hand-me-down iPad I used to read ebooks. So I downloaded the app.
And that’s when the trouble started.
I won’t bore you with the details…
…because you’ve been through it: You find a piece of technology that swears to you with its little empty soul that it will save you money, save you time, and be able to replace three other pieces of technology which are so 1997. Usually I see into the cavern of that little empty soul but this time would be different, right?
Suffice to say that after a few very dreadful weeks of wrestling with an iPad that wouldn’t perform, I have learned a few things: First, Android is better, except for the lack of decent music software and the very-necessary music community support. Second, many people who say they know things about iPads don’t know how little they know. And third, Apple doesn’t fix broken USB ports on iPads so you just have to buy a new one.
Tech and the brain
Before this episode, I thought I had conquered some quite severe sleep issues I’ve had for years. Like many women, my brain changed dramatically at menopause—mostly for the better, to tell you the truth. The unwelcome change was that I started to wake in the wee hours—between 2 and 4 am—and not just wake, but find myself fully awake, done with sleep, ready to face the day that had not yet come. But lately I had tentatively come to believe that I had fully conquered that issue. I was sleeping and it was a revelation!
Part of the remedy was a new rule: no engaging with technology after 8 pm, no email, no solving problems, no color on my screen. I still read ebooks and I play compulsive black & white solitaire to calm my thoughts, but otherwise I never break that rule. That is, until I spent every evening “researching.” Here’s an SAT Analogy Question for you: researching is to solving tech issues is…? Answer: what doomscrolling is to reading the news.2
As a result, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t enjoy playing music because every session was a fight with technology, and my search for answers even ate into my precious writing time.
It’s not just computers
Though homesteading Paleo-living neo-Luddism talk generally leaves me yawning, there’s a real foundation to our attraction to the physical simplicity of the past. Life was truly hard in a physical way before the modern world came along, but it was also comforting: when you hit a nail with a hammer, two boards were joined. Not so in the modern world. There’s an unfathomable distance between our finger on a touchscreen and the action we expect will follow. Every modern tool that promises to ease our physical struggles adds a new complexity to our lives.
The week that I was struggling with the iPad, our much-used mini-Cuisinart bit the dust. Do we need a mini-Cuisinart? Certainly not. The enormously heavy stone mortar and pestle that we got from a Thai grocery does the job magnificently. But when I have a choice between lifting that thing, using that thing, and cleaning that thing, I go for the Cuisinart. So we bought a new one.
The week that I was struggling with the iPad, I hoisted my swim bag to find that the bottom of it felt strangely like a towel. That’s because the entire bottom of the bag had given out, all at once, and couldn’t be repaired. Do I need a swim bag? No, I could just throw everything into a canvas shopping bag. But canvas retains smells and grows mold. I bought another nylon swim bag which will also fail suddenly, all at once.
The week that I was struggling with the iPad, my ebike started doing that thing with its lights again. I texted the tech at the bike shop. Then it started doing a new, more alarming thing. Do I need an ebike? Certainly not—my legs are strong enough to haul me and a traditional bike up our hill. But because of our hill—not to mention the hill that leads to our hill from the main drag, not to mention the hill down to the beach—I only rode that bike for exercise and enjoyment, not transportation. Now I ride my ebike joyfully to classes, to the store, to meet a friend for coffee. So will I insist that they figure out what’s going wrong with my 60-pound piece of technology? Yes, I will. If I can’t trust it to perform, it will go back to being an amusement rather than a tool.
So there was my week: modern life had conspired to eat up my music time, eat up my writing time, and complicate the serenity of my swim and bike time. Lack of sleep gave way to a drug which ate further away at my brain,3 which gave way to an acknowledgement that I had to go back to basics and build my sleep from the ground up.
For the simplicity of carbon-based music
In college I studied at the storied (if you happen to care about experimental computer music) Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics—commonly known as CCRMA, pronounced “karma.” I studied with composer Jonathan Berger, who probably doesn’t remember me because… I quit right when I was getting somewhere. I remember Berger as a warm and enthusiastic teacher, and I remember a conversation soon before I graduated two quarters early. “If you fill out the year, you can double major in music,” he suggested. “I think you’d be good for the department.”
But I had other ideas. I didn’t want to be that agitator who shook up a staid department (which is how I took his suggestion, though I was too awkwardly shy to ask what he meant). And I didn’t want to make music with computers. I loved going to the yearly concerts at the outdoor Frost Amphitheater, lying on a blanket listening to the cutting edge of musical exploration while the stars winked into the falling darkness. But when I made music, I truly just wanted a box with some guts strung across it, a tube with a few well-placed holes, and my limited but all-natural lungs and vocal cords. So that’s where I’ve been ever since.
The boundless options of the digital world beckon
I’ve set not just a musical goal but also stepped onto the path of a looming steep learning hill that my ebike can’t tackle. The software I fell in love with, Loopy Pro, is both simple and boundless. The simple part was great. I downloaded it and figured out how to make some, ahem, “music” within seconds. The boundless part is daunting. When it comes to technology, boundless horizons are like a beautiful sunrise to a sailor: warning of more tech hassles ahead.
And that, I think, is a good metaphor for why so many of us are stressed out, confused, angry, and not sleeping well. We live now in a world now that is boundless in many ways. We can talk to anyone, anywhere for free. We can install amazing apps that monitor our health, show us animals drinking at a watering hole in the Serengeti, and demonstrate how to remove the battery from our ebike. (Less intuitive than you might expect.)
The frustration of a boundless world
But boundlessness does not console us—it shows us constantly, every day, everything that we can’t do, everywhere that we can’t be, everyone that we can’t live up to. I’ll tell you, as someone who took up jazz at 50, I can meet those three criteria just by watching one video of a whiz kid teenager playing and singing better than I ever will. When at any time of the day we are confronted with everything that we can’t do, everywhere that we can’t be, everyone that we can’t live up to, we are essentially being confronted constantly with our own limits.
Those homesteading Paleo-living neo-Luddites have a point: they set goals that are limited and physical. Of course, any one of those pursuits can turn just as boundless if they open up YouTube for instructions, but the appeal of back-to-the-land pursuits is that they put clear, physical restraints on us. You can’t bathe in performative YouTube farmers if your plow is broken and you have to fix it or you won’t get the crops in. If you have a dumbphone and you’re sitting in a chair at the DMV, you either have to read a book or (consider this) actually strike up a conversation with a stranger.
The creativity of restriction
The best way to get really cool writing out of a teenager is not to give them freedom—it’s to put restrictions on them and ask them to struggle. The struggle against meaningful restrictions encourages us to dig deeper. The struggle against a misbehaving iPad? It just disturbs our sleep and makes us irrationally angry.
I’ll end with a beautiful sunrise because I can assume that most of you are not setting sail toward those mysterious skies. I’ll imagine you safe at home, feeling comforted by a good paper book, your room warmed by a good old wood fire, not a lick of technology to ruin a lovely (though blustery) day. I am reaching out to you from that unfathomable beyond in a world of possibilities, but I wish you some simple securities, that when you pound a nail it will go in, that when you pot a plant it will grow, and that when you go to sleep tonight, you will forget your misbehaving tablet, you will forget about the encroachment of AI, you will forget about those fearmongering politicians, and you will dream of lovely loops of sound, cradling you into the safe sea of sleep.
The Babblery can use your support. Please comment on, like, and share this post. Recommend our publication to your friends. Become a paid subscriber. Buy us a coffee. Buy Wally and Tabitha some cat food. Listen to KSQD. Be awesome and carry on.
If you enjoy podcasts, please subscribe to the Babblery on your favorite podcast platform, including Spotify, Amazon, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
A fellow Midwesterner once said this to me, and it is so, so true: “When a Californian says to a Midwesterner, ‘Let’s have lunch sometime,’ the Midwesterner gets out their calendar!”
Properly formatted: researching : tech issues = doomscrolling : reading the news
Oh, the glory of Tylenol PM and the misery of knowing what it does to us.
From your mouth to ... well, boundlessness.
Of course I can’t read everything everywhere or it adds to my confusion when trying to tell something new to a friend or casual acquaintance. Nonetheless, I saw this on my phone feed before I’d opened anything else and was completely charmed with your writing today. I want to send today’s post to my three excellent writer wordsmith sons and hope at least one of them will read it. I loved this, Suki. Thanks.