For years, clips of Klaus Kinski’s onstage rampage in Werner Herzog’s documentary My Best Fiend haunted me. I had been familiar with this actor’s eccentric, tantrum-filled personality. After all who can forget his endearing lines to Walter Saxer – “Come on, lick my **s man, we’re making a movie!” – during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. Or his blowup during a marriage in Rome, or his blowup in Cannes during a Q&A for his last film Paganini…the list is endless.

The scene I am referring to is a clip from Kinski’s spoken word performance in 1971 Jesus Christ Saviour (Jesus Christus Erlöser ). It showed a megalomaniac who saw himself as the savior, and when pacific members of the audience attempted to have their say, they got a mouthful from the performer, even violently shoved. Eruptions ended with Kinski storming off the stage.

Luckily I read somewhere that the clip, in some way was taken out of context. In that description, it said that after most people left, Kinski returned to complete the performance, and those who stayed behind were treated to the rendition they were suppose to see. I recently revisited a favorite film from my childhood: Roman Polanski’s Tess. I found it so rewarding, I attempted to dig up Jesus Chrisus Erloser, and have a closer look at the man who fathered Natassja Kinski.

And what I found, was that the clip grossly misrepresented Kinski. If you watch the entire performance (below in 9 parts), you will note that Kinski was brutally heckled from the first sentence onward. Members of the audience did not let up even after two walk-offs. The piece itself, a monologue of the New Testament spanning some 30 written pages is a gorgeous creation that delves into the depth of the human condition, a vehicle that enabled the unblinking Kinski to display a talent that some have said made Brando’s work look like child’s play.

In a way, the audience heckling was transforming. Even if Kinski began the night to deliver a portrait of Jesus, by the end of the night – through repeated crucifixions and taunting from the faceless black hall- he was transfigured into his subject. Some have speculated that the hecklers were part of the program, but what I saw was the true anxiety of an artist who was devoted to his craft, and had to make it through 30 pages on memory alone. Heckling a person during such a tightrope act would be akin to bringing an electric keyboard to a concert hall and playing during a Rachmaninov piano recital. I don’t know who these people were, but I found the sight of them casually strolling on stage to add their two bits appalling.

It should be noted that German audiences are known for being hostile. I heard somewhere that jazz musicians who returned to festivals with the same material the second year could expect airborne legumes, fruits, and assorted nightshades. Or perhaps they just weren’t that familiar with the spoken format in a large hall. Long before the likes of Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian, Kinski blazed a trail, turning a simple reading into a metatextual entity, most probably not of his choice.

After the credits roll (Part 9/9), and almost everyone has left, Kinski returns to perform for a small group of faithful listeners, who recognized Jesus Christ Saviour ( Jesus Christus Erlöser ) as a creation worthy of attention. Kinski walks among the group, talking in a hushed calm voice. Much to filmmaker Peter Geyer’s credit, beautiful shots of audience members listening are immersed in the performer’s words. Not to be missed!

When Kanye West’s Auto-Tune malfunctions in the studio, he resorts to the next best thing: wearing Cher’s Uninhibited.

I was at that rat’s maze some of you know as Ikea. Normally I go there to play “gay couples vs. mail order brides,” tallying up which group has a higher head count before my visit is up. I actually like Ikea’s stuff. Snobs may poo-poo it as disposable furniture, but that is precisely the charm of it. Who wants to live with the same furniture forever unless is it’s an authentic Shaker dresser? Ikea gives you the living space of the season, and it’s affordable enough to toss if you wake up one morning on the wrong side of bed and hit your head on that armoire.

Modern high fashion, another concept that changes with every season, by contrast, is pure smoke and mirrors. That’s why I roll eyeballs and muffle a laugh when I hear some girls go ga-ga over brand labels and furiously name-drop designers as if being “associated” with those names is a validation ticket to the coveted lifestyle among the arrivistes. It’s no different than Asian women purchasing luxury items as simulacrum for a Western identity.

In 1999, Tommy Hilfiger was rumored to have “publicly admitted to Oprah that he wished African-Americans, Hispanics, Jewish people and Asians would not buy his clothes because ‘they are made for upper class white people.’” What breathtaking brilliance on a marketing level! He probably disseminated that rumor himself. I betcha minorities the next day were secretly ordering every Hilfiger item online, while publicly denouncing the designer as a racist. I have said this before: The most effective way to invoke the greatest passion in people to cross a threshold is to put a gate up. They could have walked by that unprotected opening every day for the thousandth time without thinking to enter, but the moment a gate goes up, entering becomes a sign of prestige.

I tried valiantly to remember a tv documentary I saw almost twenty years ago. It was an incisive and critical look at the fashion industry. This was just at the nascent stages of supermodel worship, so most of the program concentrated on the nuts-and-bolts of fashion marketing. My memory failing me, I dragged out my trusty old Sony Betamax, plugged it in, and who would have known! That very videocassette is still in the player. It is Gina and Jeremy Newson’s The Look (1992) produced by Janet Street-Porter for BBC-2. It’s a fantastic, eye-opening program. I was surprised you can’t even find it mentioned online. When I typed in “fashion industry”+”documentary”+critical, all that turned up were more supermodel infatuation films. I guess the fashion powers-that-be have done everything they could to erase this documentary from the face of the earth….or at the very least, among the Macy’s set.

Among some of the gems discussed in the program is the notion of seating at a fashion show. Celebrities and magazine editors jockey for the most prestigious front row seats, but they are also the worst seats in the house. All the photographers stand in front of you and you see nothing. But it’s important to be seen in those seats. What’s more, if you’re a magazine fashion writer and you say one bad word about a collection, you won’t be invited back the next show. So in order to give us fashion advice, these editors who crave the most prominent seats have to brown-nose the designers just so they’ll be invited back another season. But in order to get that invite, they can’t say a critical word about the collection.

And we’re taking fashion advice from these tastemakers? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

The concept of diffusion is the most fascinating item for me. A collection showcases a dress for $30,000 on a runway. 6 people (mostly nouveau riche ladies of middle eastern oil tycoons alongside wives of junk bond dealers) can afford it. The label gets brought down a notch to a $3000-$5000 dress and now hundreds of people who want to purchase the simulacra of taste and breeding hand their credit cards over. The designer adds a consumer line to their collection (Emporio Armani, Armani Exchange, DKNY, Lauren, Brooks Brothers 346) and the washed masses rush in to drop $200 -$400 for a simple sweater. Most of the time, the designer themselves don’t even have ANYTHING to do with making the clothes at this level. They merely sell the licensing rights to their name, and some no name clothier from Thailand slaps the purchased logo onto their handiwork and mark it up by 500%. (This aren’t the knockoffs, it’s the *cough* real thing that then gets shipped to U.S. Stores as the genuine brand item.) You wait and you wait for that sale at Macy’s (which comes around approximately every 12 hours). And finally for those who simply need to feel rich and look like Linda Evangelista (oh alright, Gisele Bundchen for you Ugg Boots wearing embryonic fashionistas), they drop what’s left of their week’s pay on a bottle of Eau de Parfum. (Chanel No.5: Total cost of ingredients $3, packaging: $6, Administration $8. Advertising $8. Final price: $62..00 in 1992)

Where do I fit in in this absurdist pyramid? I’d have to say I’ll be at the Goodwill / Oxfam with my trusty measuring tape. And oh can I pick them! My togs are so fetch, when I sashay pass old biddies in Philly, they rise from their wheelchairs in pilled-cardigans grumbling “oh no she didn’t!”

To that I say, “if you think I look antiquated now, wait till you see what I have in store for next season! Grandmama, Please!”

I think when you combine lack of import tariffs, overseas outsourcing, and illegal immigrant workers, that’s a substantial group of people who are taking American jobs away. If those people are not here physically, they are undercutting the supply lines from afar.

That’s not the entire picture though. It’s convenient to be able to put a face to a villain, to target a foe that everyone can immediately point a finger at. However, I think there’s a larger adversary that can’t be pinned down as easily: it’s the democratizing nature of technology. In many job interviews I have gone to, the interview often began with the boss prefacing “the business isn’t what is used to be.”

Perhaps it’s the field that I’m involved in (graphics / publishing / performance / intellectual property), but I can’t think of many sectors where computers and the internet haven’t affected in some way or another. The access given to anyone with a mere computer connection gives him / her the ability to circumvent an elitism once reserved only to those with thousands of dollars of equipment, professional networking, upstart capital, and physical presence. Now that’s not to say they’ll always have the ability and know-how to produce works of comparable, professional quality. However, at the same time this “new democracy” floods the market with the riffraff of unwashed masses who charged a copy of desktop publishing software, or some DJ mixing program to his/ her credit card, it also gives visibility to true masters of the craft who would otherwise have remained undiscovered.

There was a time a musician or writer needed to find an agent, a publisher who needed to be pandered to, a test market, and a research company to gauge public appeal and financial risk in the returns, before she could even get her product out to the audience. Not anymore. These days, you could create something and share it the moment you saved and uploaded the file.

Of course, easy come easy go. And that means, the landscape is absolutely inundated with mediocrity – my blog is a good place to start. But here’s the unsung perk of technological democracy: where the established artists once had a comfortable moat to cushion against all these creative basement zombies from entering their domain, they now have to work that much harder to rise above the thicket, to actually prove to their backers that they have what it takes above and beyond the call of duty.

They have to answer to quality.

In Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival, bush hippie survivalist Cody Lundin says that being barefoot for over 20 years has enabled him to slow-down and pay attention to where he is going.

Surrounded by cyber-warrior modernists who are simultaneously texting, chatting on the cell phone, watching a dvd, and driving through a busy intersection, this statement appealed to my Luddite sensibilities. Combined that with my love of J.S. Bach’s seeming simplicity and Cage’s asceticism, it’s easy to understand how I can hear where Lundin is coming from. If you place his statement alongside the beat aphorism “We’re going nowhere fast,” or even “Fools rush in” you realize it’s a full inversion. We’re slowly getting somewhere. A far more rewarding proposition.

One of the things that have changed in my adulthood are the brakes I find myself applying more frequently. Some call it patience, but I see it as proceeding with caution. I twist a wrench slower, I press a button to a motorized device more sparingly. I believe lesser, more meaningful notes can make more music. It’s the path we all have to travel towards eventual silence, oneness…the final void. The popular conception is that sound, vision, reasoning, general sensations and sensory abilities all disappear with age. I think it’s perception vs. reality.

It’s not that sounds, for example, disappear. It’s that we have learned to progressively do more with less, until the pause between each note has stretched to such a daredevil length we have stopped hearing the music. Thus music hasn’t stopped: we just forgot how long ago the last note sounded, and eventually, we finally don’t make it to the next one.

Jeremy Wade and friend

I never understood hunters. Yes, I practiced vegeterianism for years, but returned to a well-rounded palette in order to learn cooking. I just never grasped the notion of leisurely destroying another living thing for pleasure and bragging rights, especially when one announced before hand: “She’s a beauty!” Personally, I’d like to know if wives of hunters worry when they are told they are beautiful.

Survival is something altogether different. I watch all of Discovery / Animal Planet survival shows with great anticipation. I wouldn’t necessarily drink pachydermal fecal water or sleep inside a dead camel’s carcass, but….it’s good to know. One wonders how victims of Katrina would have fared if they knew all they needed was bleach and fire (perhaps for boiling or to make charcoal for filtration) to sanitize and make storm water drinkable. Potassium Permanganate (from Hardware stores like Lowes, or pet / fish stores) + Glycerin (pharmacies) – instant fire. Catching a wild animal, gutting it properly, and consuming it…all necessities in emergency situations. I still think all meat eaters should kill each type of animal they eat with their own hands once in their lifetime. Just to understand what you are doing. I hate to say this, but human beings – in survival situations- can’t possibly lie down and perish, surrendering our position on the food chain purely out of humane reasons. In not flattering ourselves above the wild kingdom, we become a small part of the larger picture. Animals would eat us if they had to survive. In our anthropomorphic delirium, we fancy them noble.

That’s simply because we don’t know what they are thinking, since animals can’t blog.

Watching all these survivalist shows reminds me of my late father, a wild country bumpkin who rode motorcycles all around, outrunning the police on their Triumphs with his Nortons. He was a great fan of the Welsh / Scottish Outward Bound schools. Though he later became a teacher, he escaped – in his youth- into the dense rainforest for weeks during the Japanese occupation, refusing to suffer an invaded country or kill to defend it. After weeks, he returned, but the government denied him schooling, and he was subsequently raised by Irish Catholic monks.

As a result of surviving in the wild, my dad had a real feel of staying in touch with the grittier side our civilization has trained us to forget. Of all the fathers in my mom’s extended, posh family, my dad was the only one who took their kids out hunting in the tropical rainforest, wading through bogs, swamps, and rivers, and emerging with soiled rifles and bodies covered with bloodsucking leeches and a wild boar at the end of the day. It’s amusing to see some of my affluent cousins grow up to be men who turned their noses up at a life of luxury, choosing instead to go off into the wild to fish and rough it out in the jungle. They are really my father’s sons in that sense.

Of all the guys on Discovery, Jeremy Wade of River Monsters (originally from Animal Planet) is my favorite. Don’t get me wrong, just because I love survival shows, doesn’t mean I can go longer than 12 hours without taking a hot shower. Rivers and oceans frighten the heck out of me. If I wade in the seashore and my feet touches a seaweed, I will get a heart attack and die instantly on the spot (it’s happened many times before) I get icky just feeling sticky skin against cotton fabric on a hot summer day. But I LOVE Jeremy Wade’s scary show, which I watch, bulwarked behind a wall of stuffed animals. He is a blend of humane, erudite, inquisitive, tough guy, and teacher: all qualities I saw in my dad.

Some may say Wade is a handsome guy. But men are attractive to me by what they have accomplished, what they know, their fearlessness, and how they behave. You could look like the handsomest guy in the world, you can be physically attractive, you can have a gorgeous face, you can be well-endowed, you can be built, tall, gym-strong, you can know good wine, and use fancy words….but the internal engine, the soul that makes you tick, drives you to acquire (not manufactured products, but wisdom), defines you as a human being….THAT, is what enamors me to a man.

Re: modern civilization, one of the greatest concerns I have is the ever decreasing level of returns we are willing to put up with when it comes to Quality vs technology.

The advent of the mp3 / wmv format of music is a perfect illustration of this. I’m happy to hear that music enthusiasts are returning to vinyl to a certain extent. I’m not sure how much of this is a striving for analog nuance and not just a retro fetish for a whimsical past. After all, blind lab tests show that most people can’t differentiate a 320k mp3 from an analog recording.

The incriminating evidence is a little bit more involved than wave forms and social phenomenon. In order to understand the way we have been trained to make do with less, you have to first understand the limitations of digital audio. Hailing from a structure of 0 and 1 binary bits, digital audio – when magnified – generates perpendicular steps in their wave forms, when it should, ideally be smooth analog curves. Imagine yourself on a rollercoaster ride, and instead of smooth steel tracks, or rickety wooden ones, you are bumping down stairs on a painful pair of redden buttocks. It’s like a Sir George Solti recording through the ears of Jackass’s Steve-O.

It was arguable whether an average person’s ears were discriminating enough to pick up on this microscopic detail. Vague words like full and warm have often been used to describe a rich analog recording. When new wave music, with its banks of midi sequencers and synthesizers came along in the 80s generating square waves with digital bits, the compact disc generation found a match made in heaven. I can’t say I didn’t welcome the CD format with open arms. There’s nothing more annoying than hearing pops and clicks during a solo piano performance, but most of you today may not remember the howl of protest over the “cold,” “metallic” range of cd’s. This is an era when people still had Studer Revoxes in their home entertainment centers, and Infinity built their Reference Speaker set (pictured above).

We didn’t think audio quality could get any lower than cd’s. If anything, we thought it would improve. There was the SACD (Super Audio Compact Discs) and XRCD (Extended Resolution Compact Discs). And with Mobile Fidelity still around, there was at least still a chance for discerning audiophiles. But then the computer generation took over, with it’s small PC speakers, mp3, wmv, RA, and ogg formats. (Does anyone even know what FLAC format is?) In order to accommodate these tiny speakers, music started to be “Remastered” in reissues of many classic recordings. At first, I thought “remastering” meant a general clean-up of old recordings, the removal of unwanted artifacts with newer technology, much like the remastering of the original Wizard of Oz movie or Decca Records’ remastering of their Legends series. But what Remastering eventually became, was an overcompression of a recording. This meant that the quiet passages were boosted while the loud passages got reduced. A quiet Mozart Lieder now sounded as as close to a no longer thunderous Mahler symphony. The result was a mid-level drone that never let up. The nuances were gone, but everything came through better when “ripped” to mp3. People reported being inexplicably exhausted by the end of listening to their favorite remastered album. Why did they do this? It was to suit the limited dynamic range of the reduced output devices, namely mp3 players, IPODS, computer speakers, and online streaming music. Music with reduced dynamic range would sound peachy when played through devices with reduced dynamic range. Everyone goes home happy.

Except for the dude sitting at home with his all-tube Macintosh preamp, Crown power amps, and a set of Klipschorn speakers.

Once technology used to serve mankind, but now, we are slowly readjusting our standards to accommodate the limitations of computers. We are lowering our expectations to serve computers. This turn of events is called “The Loudness War.”

I recently wanted to celebrate the rite of Spring with the beloved Bill Evans recording You Must Believe In Spring. I bought my first copy in a vinyl LP format in the early 80s, when still a teen. I fell in love with it immediately. So I thought I’d have an updated copy with a “Remastered” version from Rhino. What I got was a compressed recording that had the acoustic bass pumped up almost to the level of the Evans’s piano, competing with it for attention. It’s not to the point of “clipping,” but it definitely lost the nuance of the performance, especially for a recording noted for its quiet, meditative and ruminative selections.

All that would be even tolerable, IF the parties responsible did not overlook a truncated note from the opening of “The Peacocks.” How, you ask, could this have happened? My theory is that the mastering compression plug-in was set with a level “gate” that reduced anything below a certain level to silence. And since the opening note is very quiet, lone piano note, it got zapped. I am shocked people at Rhino would have missed that. I put it on my remastering software and reverse-engineered the note to be prepended to the head of the song.

Science fiction writers have long prophesied a time when machine would win the battle against man. I tend to think it will happen not in that flamboyant Hollywood way, with the Terminator and Skynet bringing about the end of the world in a gigantic explosion, followed by skull-crushing laser-shooting tanks. I see that as a metaphor for what is really happening. If anything, it will be more along the lines of the frog in a pot of cold water that is slowly being brought to a boil. Look around you: people are physically interacting with strangers less (they are too focused on “tweeting” about their walk across a dangerous intersection in real time); people go out less often, we no longer care about acting, but concentrate more on Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) and Wow! graphics with deafening volume levels in our movies; printed matter,once revisable with Orwellian burn markers, are now deletable with ebooks and Kindle books, we can’t even find our way to a new place without the aid of google maps, mapquest, dashboard GPS, and all our credit banking personal information are slowly being surrendered migrated online, controlled by switches, routers, web servers, and frame relays.

This may sound a little like Luddite paranoia, but my point is that we’re literally handing our lives over to a technocentric system. And along with that surrender, we’ve also lowered our expectations in regards to quality.

When he was alive, my dad used to say “it’s a romantic idea, indeed.” And when my sister and I would look at him with mouths agape, he’d say “no, not the lovey dovey romantic, I’m talking about idealism.” I guess it made an impression, because now I am merely a lady of leisure with nothing but a degree in English.

I still remember going to the local hardware store on main street, and getting careful advice from the attentive shopkeeper. I was buying a 20 cent washer.

When our store fell to the huge Home Depots and Lowes that came to town, I was sadden. As with everything else, one has to travel progressively farther to get American quality, as the outskirts are the only place a company devoted to quality (and not quick effortless profit) can open shop. I traveled as far as Wyoming for a hand-made American purchase once.

Still, there’s a part of me that tries to re-create the romance of American quality. Our house is only a little over 60 years old, but you can tell from the doors that the wood was manufactured from grade lumber. I even get excited when I see the words “American Standard” in the bathroom. Any help you can get to remind people how great the country once was, is welcomed.

I often sit and wonder what is the future of quality. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance made a huge impression on me when I was a kid. The three countries I think of when I think of quality are Germany, Japan, and America. Sometimes I am almost panic-stricken by the notion that the memory of quality will disappear from society, that we will no longer remember what doing things the right way, and the result of doing things the right way looks like.

Guess that’s why the New York Steinway is in safekeeping at my house.