A Slap in the Face of Naïveté

Terry O'Neill

If Woodstock was the zenith of the hippie-era aspiration for free love, then Altamont was its nadir

National Post, Monday, September 14, 2009

If nothing else, the news that British police are reviewing the July 1969 drowning death of founding Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones demonstrates that, even after almost half a century at centre stage, the Stones -- even the dead ones on whom moss has most certainly grown -- continue to possess an uncanny ability to command the public spotlight unlike few other entertainment acts. Or, for that matter, unlike few other people on Earth.

This ability to mesmerize the media and the masses also was evident at a more mundane level when newspapers and websites around the world published an entertainment-industry trifle disclosing that Sir Mick Jagger and his grizzled group of geriatric rockers are now, at $9-million a show, the world's most expensive wedding band.

It seems that whatever the story --dead Stones, money-grubbing Stones or simply ever-rolling Stones -- it matters little. They captivate us still.

It must be noted, however, that there was one rather significant show-biz and pop-culture story from the summer with which the Rolling Stones were not associated: the celebration in mid-August of the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, the renowned gig at which the famous band did not play, but which nevertheless quickly became known as an epoch-defining event.

Having missed the magic bus ride to the Age of Aquarius that supposedly sprung fully formed from the mud of Max Yasgur's field in upstate New York, the Rolling Stones decided to stage a festival of their own later in the year at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. But poor planning forced the Stones to move the event at the last moment to a venue 30 minutes down the road.

And so, despite only two days' notice and with virtually no advertising, some 300,000 fans flocked to Altamont Speedway on Dec. 6, 1969, to gambol in what they expected to be some sort of post-Woodstockian stardust being sprinkled on an event billed as "three days of peace and music." That was the plan, anyway.

Instead, it is generally agreed that Altamont, with its four fatalities (one fan stabbed by a boozy Hells Angels bouncer; one drowned in an irrigation ditch; two run over by a hit-and-run driver while they slept) brought a crashing end to the euphoria created by the Woodstock festival just four months before. If Woodstock was the zenith of the hippie-era aspiration for free love, free weed and an eternal playlist of rock and psychedelic music, then Altamont was its nadir.

After all these years, however, it seems to me that Woodstock, which a contemporary observer enthused was "the greatest weekend since creation," was actually much less than what it appeared at the time, and Altamont was actually much more. Indeed, if it is true that Woodstock embodied generational aspirations -- that is, a drug-fuelled, euphoric utopianism where music, peace and love frolic like lambs in a field of clover -- then common sense should tell us that whatever success the festival enjoyed was, to put it bluntly, a fluke.

It was all a fantasy. The Age of Aquarius was actually the Age of Illusion. Or Self-Delusion. Anyone with half a brain knows, or should know, that half a million people cannot subsist on pot smoke and good intentions, no matter how much Jimi Hendrix they listen to. Yes, it was a good party, but it was not and could not be reality.

As surely as Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings inevitably return with "terror and slaughter" to claim hapless people who fall for the latest "ism," certain truths about our mortal existence here on Earth asserted themselves with devastating consequence at Altamont. Chief among them was the fact that half-baked notions of universal love will do little to protect human wellbeing when common sense is jettisoned.

Jagger may have thought that giving thugs unlimited beer, in exchange for their agreeing to protect his pitiful four-foot-high stage, would provide sufficient security, and he also may have presumed that an overriding Aquarian spirit would pacify the throng, but he was dead wrong on both counts.

If naivete was allowed to strut about unchecked at Woodstock, it received a needed slap in the face at Altamont. The idealism of the hippie era didn't tragically die at Altamont; it committed unavoidable suicide.

I can't help but recall the interview Jagger gave to a distinguished panel of academics and religious leaders during a British public-affairs TV show, World in Action, filmed shortly after he had escaped drug charges in the summer of 1967.

Asked how he wanted to be understood by the world, especially by young people, Jagger answered, "Just in the very way that I started myself, when I was quite young, which is just to have as good a time as possible, which most young people do try and do without any regard to responsibilities of any sort... The main thing to start off is to have as good a time as possible."

Two years later at Altamont, it became quite apparent that simply having "as good a time as possible" was as pathetic an excuse for a personal philosophy as could be imagined. It remains a tragedy that so many people of the Sixties and beyond still fail to recognize this. - Terry O'Neill is a Vancouver writer and editor who is also co-host of RoadkillRadio.com.

© 2009 The National Post Company. All rights reserved. Unauthorized distribution, transmission or republication strictly prohibited.

How high do you want your fi?

By Steve Guttenberg   •   Stereophile   •   April, 2009

Would you really want a perfect hi-fi?

Indulge my fantasy for a second—I'm talking about a system with DC-to-light bandwidth, zero noise and distortion, and unlimited dynamic range and resolution. It's an audiophile conundrum: When output precisely matches input, have we attained nirvana?

Maybe not. Most CDs and LPs aren't all that transparent, so I'm wondering if our obsession with transparency is misplaced. Soundstaging? Not if you listen to rock or jazz—the music's spatial depth, low-level ambience, dimensionality, and reverberation are all fabricated in the mix. Dynamics? Sorry, pal—compression, and lots of it, is an integral part of the recording, mixing, and mastering of most of the music you buy.

I blame my Magnepan 3.6R loudspeakers for this latest round of audiophile soul-searching. The Maggies tell me more about the music embedded in bits, pits, or grooves than any other speaker I've had in my home system. The panels' 55"-tall ribbon tweeters resolve differences between recordings with uncanny precision.

That said, a perfect speaker, amplifier, turntable, or CD player wouldn't automatically make every recording sound lifelike. At that point, the gear wouldn't have a "sound" per se; rather, the gear would lay bare the sound of each recording. I'm guessing that such a system would reveal the best recordings' innate musicality and that the middle-range recordings would still sound revelatory, but also that a significant percentage of your music would sound pretty ratty. Contrasting a pure audiophile recording like Ry Cooder and V.M. Bhatt's A Meeting by the River (CD, Water Lily Acoustics WLA-CS-29-CD) with Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run (CD, Columbia CK 33795) would be a mind-warping experience.

The Boss's album instantly transforms my MG 3.6Rs into a pair of 6'-tall AM radios. Yuck. Born to Run sounds all kinds of awful—grainy, harsh, spatially flat, dynamically crushed, with truly nasty-sounding reverberation—and I still love the music. This record suffers from what I call the Humpty Dumpty Effect: once the sound is broken, a system comprising gear rated Class A in Stereophile's "Recommended Components" won't undo such sonic mutilations, only reveal them with greater clarity. But I can turn off the analytical, audio-critic side of my brain and just let it be. No matter what, Springsteen rocks.

A Meeting by the River is breathtakingly gorgeous—it sounds you-are-there spectacular. Cooder's bottleneck guitar all but materializes between the MG 3.6Rs—I hear it and Cooder's band filling the acoustic space of Christ the King Chapel. That's no accident; the album was produced and recorded by a master engineer, Kavi Alexander, whose recording chain—microphones, mike preamps, analog tape deck, and analog-to-digital converter—were all designed and built by Tim de Paravicini. When you're listening to this album, you're hearing it through the audiophile-grade gear with which it was produced.

I think/hope that most of us put together hi-fi systems that reflect our sonic preferences. We like what we like: tubes, solid-state, analog, digital, electrostatics, horns, whatever. Considered purely objectively, tube electronics are less "accurate" than solid-state; the same can be said of CD vs vinyl. But if vinyl, or tubes, or both are what raise the hairs on the back of your neck, so be it. At the end of the day, what we crave is good old musicality. Music moves us more than sound. A lot more.

I think the age-old analog/digital divide is the least of it. The musicians do their thing, and the microphones, their positions relative to the instruments, and the skill and imagination brought to bear by the engineer, producer, and masterer in their use of equalization, compression, processing, etc., create the sound we hear. Analog tape, if used at all, is a mere flavor; today, virtually no one mixes or edits in analog; tape just about always gets bumped to digital before the recording date is complete. Pop or rock music is rarely played and sung live in the studio by the entire band. Out-of-tune singers and players are pitch-corrected, and drummers' off-kilter rhythms are tweaked. There's not a lot of there there.

Audiophile recordings, however, are almost always recorded "live," with the entire group playing in real time, and with minimal EQ, compression, and processing. But even these efforts never truly sound like the real thing. The very best high-end speakers and electronics are still a long way from perfect sound reproduction. Here, I define perfect as "indistinguishable from the sound of live music"; whether it's symphony orchestras, jazz combos, or rock'n'roll bands, we're still not even close. Some solo instruments fare better; guitars, flutes, voices—you can almost get a glimpse of their actual sounds. But a drum kit? An acoustic piano? No way.

One of the reasons we're not yet even in the ballpark is that we're still stuck in two-channel mode. Don't get me wrong—I love stereo—but if I could get the whole enchilada of a 360° virtual-reality experience, I'd plunk down serious cash. However, I've yet to hear a multichannel mix, whether on SACD, DVD-Audio, or Blu-ray, that's appreciably better than two-channel sound. We still await a holographically convincing recording technique to get us there.

The fantasy of perfect-fi is further complicated by the acoustics of the listening room. If you placed a perfect speaker system in an average room, you still wouldn't have perfect sound. The very best room-correction systems are a beginning, but they can't make your room disappear. We won't see that for a long, long time.

Which brings me to my final point: Does any of this matter? Most of my music collection hews closer to Springsteen's sound than to Cooder's. We've grown so accustomed to hearing heavily processed music that we now accept it as at least plausibly realistic.

The music is what we're here for. If it were perfectly reproduced, would we enjoy it any more? Or would we be happier if our speakers and/or electronics smoothed over the sound's rougher edges? Mark Levinson observed years ago that one of the worst symptoms of the audiophile "disease" is playing only music that sounds good through your system, to the exclusion of the music you love because the latter sounds less good through your system. I've been there; I know firsthand how absurd that is. Listen to music, not your hi-fi.—Steve Guttenberg

by Stacy Conradt - January 1, 2009 - 6:00 AM

Like a lot of you, I grew up on Sesame Street and the Muppets. But did you ever stop to wonder where they came from? Some of the characters we know and love were recycled from other TV shows and commercials Jim Henson worked on, while others were invented by using whatever materials were around. Be prepared for a little nostalgia, and I hope I didn’t leave out your favorite – not all of the characters have interesting background stories (sorry, Big Bird).

1. Cookie Monster. Jim Henson drew some monsters eating various snacks for a General Foods commercial in 1966. The commercial was never used, but Henson recycled one of the monsters (the “Wheel-Stealer”) for an IBM training video in 1967 and again for a Fritos commercial in 1969. By this time, he started working on Sesame Street and decided this monster would have a home there.

2. Elmo. The way it’s described by a Sesame Street writer, apparently this extra red puppet was just lying around. People would try to do something with him, but nothing really panned out. In 1984, puppeteer Kevin Clash picked up the red puppet and started doing the voice and the personality and it clicked – thus, Elmo was born.

3. Telly Monster was originally the Television Monster when he debuted in 1979. He was obsessed with TV and his eves would whirl around as if hypnotized whenever he was in front of a set. After a while, producers started worrying about his influence on youngsters, so they changed him to make him the chronic worrier he is now.

4. Count von Count made his first appearance in 1972 and was made out of an Anything Muppet pattern – a blank Muppet head that could have features added to it to make various characters. He used to be more sinister – he was able to hypnotize and stun people and he laughed in typical scary-villain-type fashion after completing a count of something and thunder and lightning would occur. He was quickly made more appealing to little kids, though. He is apparently quite the ladies’ man – he has been linked to Countess von Backward, who loves to count backward; Countess Dahling von Dahling and Lady Two.
5. Kermit was “born” in 1955 and first showed up on “Sam and Friends,” a five-minute puppet show by Jim Henson. The first Kermit was made out of Henson’s mom’s coat and some ping pong balls. At the time, he was more lizard-like than frog-like. By the time he showed up on Sesame Street in 1969, though, he had made the transition to frog. There are rumors that he got the name Kermit from a childhood friend of Henson’s or a puppeteer from the early days of the Muppets, but Henson always refuted both of those rumors.

6. Real Swedish Chef Lars “Kuprik” Bäckman claims he was the inspiration for the Swedish Chef. He was on Good Morning America, he says, and caught Jim Henson’s eye. Henson supposedly bought the rights to the Good Morning Americarecording and created the Swedish Chef (who DOES have a real name, but it’s not understandable). One of the Muppet writers, Jerry Juhl, says that in all of the years of working with Jim Henson on the Swedish Chef, he never heard that the character was based on a real person.
7. Animal. Everyone’s favorite member of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem may have been inspired by Keith Moon of The Who. This is speculation, but people who support this theory will point out that Jim Henson named one of the Fraggle Rockcharacters “Wembley,” which is the town Moon was born in.
8. Miss Piggy is apparently from Iowa. Makes sense. Anyway, she started as a minor character on The Muppet Show, but anyone who knows Miss Piggy can see that she wouldn’t settle for anything “minor.” Her first TV appearance was actually on an Herb Alpert special. It wasn’t until 1976, when The Muppet Show premiered, that she became the glamorous blonde with a penchant for frog that we know and love today. Frank Oz once said that Miss Piggy grew up in Iowa; her dad died when she was young and her mother was mean. She had to enter beauty contests to make money.

9. Rowlf the Dog, surprise, surprise, was first made in 1962 for a series of Purina Dog Chow commercials. He went on to claim fame as Jimmy Dean’s sidekick on The Jimmy Dean Show and was on every single episode from 1963 to 1966. Jimmy Dean said Rowlf got about 2,000 letters from fans every week. He was considered for Sesame Street but ended up becoming a regular on The Muppet Show in 1976.

10. Oscar the Grouch is performed by the same guy who does Big Bird, Carroll Spinney. Spinney said he based Oscar’s cranky voice on a particular NYC cab driver he once had the pleasure of riding with. He was originally an alarming shade of orange. In Pakistan, his name is Akhtar and he lives in an oil barrel. In Turkey, he is Kirpik and lives in a basket. And in Israel, it’s not Oscar at all – it’s his cousin, Moishe Oofnik, who lives in an old car.

11. Gonzo. What exactly is Gonzo? Nobody knows. Even Jim Henson had no particular species in mind. Over the course of The Muppet Show, Muppet Babies and various Muppet movies, Gonzo has been referred to as a “Whatever”, a “Weirdo” and an alien. Whatever he is, he first appeared on the scene in 1970’s The Great Santa Claus Switch. His name was Snarl the Cigar Box Frackle. In 1974, he showed up on a T.V. special for Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. He became Gonzo the Great by the first season ofThe Muppet Show and developed his thing for Camilla the Chicken almost accidentally: during one episode where chickens were auditioning for the show, puppeteer Dave Goelz ad-libbed, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you… nice legs, though!” It was decided then and there that Gonzo would have a bizarre romantic interest in chickens.

12. You have to love Statler and Waldorf. I couldn’t find much on their particular inspiration, but I can tell you that they’ve been around since the 1975 Muppet Show pilot. They are named after popular New York City hotels (the Statler Hotel was renamed the Hotel Pennsylvania in 1992.) Guess what Waldorf’s wife name is? Yep… Astoria (she looks startlingly like Statler.) FYI, Waldorf is the one with the mustache and white hair. Statler has the grey hair. Apparently Waldorf has had a pacemaker for more than 30 years.

13. Beaker. I always thought of Beaker and his buddy Bunsen Honeydew as characters that came along later in the Muppet timeline, but they have been around since the The Muppet Show. Although Beaker usually says things along the lines of, “Mee-mee-mee-mee!”, he has had a few actual lines: “Sadly temporary,” “Bye-Bye” and “Make-up ready!” Despite being word-challenged, he manages to do a pretty convincing Little Richard impression and, surprisingly, had mad beatbox skills. Beaker is one of the only Muppets that was never recycled from some other purpose – he was created solely for The Muppet Show.

14. Fozzie Bear. Poor Fozzie. He’s the perpetual target of Statler and Waldorf because of his horrible jokes and puns. It actually created a bit of a problem during the first season of The Muppet Show, because when Fozzie got heckled, he got very upset and sometimes cried. Viewers didn’t feel sympathy; they felt embarrassed. The problem was solved by making Fozzie an optimist so that even when he got heckled he was good-natured about it. It’s often thought that he was named after Frank Oz, who was his puppeteer, but Frank said it’s just a variant of “fuzzy bear.” Yet another story says he was named for his builder, Faz Fazakas. Wocka wocka!!

15. Bert and Ernie are the Muppet version of Felix and Oscar (theOdd Couple, for you young’uns). Lots of people think Bert and Ernie were named for some minor characters in It’s A Wonderful Life, but according to the Henson company, that’s just a rumor. Jim Henson always maintained that it was just a coincidence – the names just went well together and seemed to fit the characters. Jerry Juhl, one of the head writers, corroborated this and said that Jim Henson had no memory for details like that and would have never remembered the name of the cop and the taxi cab driver in the old Jimmy Stewart movie.

Other rumors to clear up: Bert and Ernie aren’t gay and neither one of them are dead. Now that we’ve got that straightened out, here are a few more tidbits: the original Ernie used to have a gravelly voice similar to Rowlf the Dog’s. Frank Oz was Bert’s puppeteer and hated him at the beginning. He thought Bert was ridiculously boring, but then realized that he could have a lot of fun with being boring. Jim Henson once said, “I remember trying Bert and Frank tried Ernie for a while. I can’t imagine doing Bert now, because Bert has become so much of a part of Frank.”

16. Grover. Everyone’s favorite “cute, furry little monster” made his TV debut on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1967. At the time, he was known as “Gleep” and was a monster in Santa’s Workshop. He then appeared on the first season of Sesame Street, but sported green fur and a reddish-orange nose. He didn’t have a name then, but by the second season he transformed into the Grover we know today, more or less – electric blue fur and a pink nose. The original green Grover was reincarnated as Grover’s Mommy for a few episodes. In Latin America and Puerto Rico Grover is known as Archibaldo, in Spain he is Coco, in Portugal he is Gualter and in Norway he is Gunnar.

17. Sweetums is one of a handful of full-body Muppets. He showed up in 1971 on the TV special The Frog Prince. This is where he got his name – when Sir Robin the Brave is about to defeat the ogre, a witch shows up and changes him into a frog (who later becomes Robin, Kermit’s nephew). Apparently smitten with the ogre, the witch tells her darling “Sweetums” that he can have the frog for breakfast.

Bigger fame awaited Sweetums, though – in 1975, he appeared on Cher’s variety show to do a duet with her to “That Old Black Magic”. He officially joined The Muppet Show cast in 1976.

18. Rizzo the Rat might sound familiar to you, especially if you’ve seen Midnight Cowboy – he is named for Dustin Hoffman’s character, Ratso Rizzo. He was created after puppeteer Steve Whitmire was inspired by rat puppets made from bottles. He first showed up on The Muppet Show as one of a group of rats following Christopher Reeve around – he’s easy to spot because he hams it up more than any of the other rats. He occasionally performs with Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.

19. Pepe the King Prawn’s full name is Pepino Rodrigo Serrano Gonzales. I heart Pepe. He was a chef in Madrid before going Hollywood on Muppets Tonight in 1996. He was paired with Seymour the Elephant (Pepe was originally going to be a mouse) on the show, but Seymour never developed quite the same following and was only in two episodes. He rarely gets names right – some of his mispronunciations include “muffins” instead of Muppets, “Kermin” instead of Kermit and “Scooper” instead of Scooter. He’s quite full of himself – in addition to thinking that he’s quite the ladies’ man, he also fully expects to win several Oscars.
20. Herry Monster from Sesame Street was the Big Bad Wolf in his original incarnation, which you can kind of tell by looking at his fur. It’s pretty wolf-like (if wolves were blue, I mean). He became a Sesame monster in 1970 to replace the Beautiful Day Monster, who looked kind of like Sam the Eagle and existed to cause destruction wherever he went, thus ruining the beautiful day people had been having before he showed up. Herry used to have a furry nose but got upgraded to his non-furry, purple nose in 1971.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/21354

February 3, 2009 6:39 AM PST

Posted by Steve Guttenberg

You can use two, but each speaker can produce stereo sound!

(Credit: Zealth Audio)

Kevin Nelson may be homeless, but his story isn't so different from countless other speaker designers I've met. Aspiring speaker designers never had it easy, but nowadays it's a lot tougher to break into the business.

Nelson says he first started building speakers when he was a kid in high school, tinkering with drivers and building cabinets. With a few investors lined up, and prospects looking good, he was planning on exhibiting his inventiveness at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year.

The U.S. Navy veteran's personal life, however, took a turn for the worse. He is currently living in a shelter in California.

Nelson never wanted to build just another speaker. No, his Zealth speaker produces stereo sound from a single box. Nelson devised special "Crossfire Imaging" crossover networks to produce stereo sound from a single speaker (the crossover is the part of the speaker that routes treble frequencies to the tweeter, bass to the woofer, etc.).

In other words, there's a right and left channel in each Zealth Audio speaker cabinet. He started working on the stereo from one speaker concept in 1989, then spent years of hard work refining the design.

Kevin Nelson, speaker designer

(Credit: Zealth Audio)

Nelson isn't opposed to using two speakers, and he feels the sound is even better with two. He says, "When the speakers are set up just right, and you're sitting in the zone, the two speakers disappear."

I was impressed with his drive to succeed. Before he was homeless, Nelson sold 35 pairs of speakers through word of mouth and on eBay. When compared to those of Polk, KEF, Klipsch, and others, the Zealth speakers, which sell for less than $1,000 per pair, have come out on top.

Nelson, whose company is called Zealth Audio Loudspeakers, is currently looking for investors so he can start full-scale production.

Interested parties can contact Kevin Nelson via e-mail at zealthaudio@email.com.

Steve Guttenberg is a frequent contributor to magazines and Web sites including Home Entertainment, Playback, and Ultimate AV. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

À l’occasion du centième anniversaire de la fondation du Canadien de Montréal, je réfléchis sur les aspects religieux d’un club de hockey dont le maillot est connu comme la « Sainte Flanelle ». Je me demande si le Canadien est une religion, en quoi, il peut l’être, quel type de religion il serait – religion instituée, religion populaire, religion civile, etc. – et quel type de relation il entretiendrait avec d’autres religions : inclusiviste, syncrétique, dimorphique, exclusiviste ?

Olivier BAUER

Professeur adjoint
Université de Montréal
Faculté de théologie et de sciences des religions