Dabble Babble

Category: Movies and Shows

  • 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.

  • For Your Consideration: Kris Atomic’s Narrowboating YouTube Channel

    I’m about halfway through the back vlogs of Kris Atomic’s narrowboat series, and I’m feeling like narrowboats are awesome. I mean they look awesome. Maybe I’d even say they look radical…not in the contemporary Molotov cocktail half-baked utopian ideology or neo-fascist gibberish sense of that word, but radical like it’s like radical dude! I’m a product of the late-20th century so bear with me and apologies for using the word ‘dude’. I hate that word too, but I’m contractually obligated by my generation to use that word in a way that may or may not be ironic.

    Moving on, (or forward if you spend all your time in an office staring at people you hate from behind a big toothy smile). Narrowboats hold a special intrigue for me that I’ll deconstruct a little bit before eventually getting to the point. You can use the sub-headings to skip to said point. I’ve added them for those with zero attention spans and also to heed the advice of internet bros who tell us this is how you become a millionaire. Wish me luck!

    My Prescient Past

    First, I grew up on a major river cutting across the middle of North America. I’ll give you two guesses and your first one is probably wrong. So riverboats, which are much larger than narrowboats, played a prominent role in the mythology of the area where I came of age. Think barges drifting down the river, deliveries to river markets, riverboat gamblers with their shady goings-on and tiny pistols hidden away in their shoes and garter belts. As you can see, I was primed for a fascination with narrow waterways.

    Second, canals. Canals are the actual highways and byways of the narrowboating world. North American canals are, of course, different from the British waterways I’m talking about here. While I certainly visited a few canals in my early days, I’ve become more acquainted with their weird and wonderful qualities living in Upstate New York. Here’s a map of our extensive canal system in New York.

    New York State Canal System

    But, I’ll talk about the New York State canal system some other time. This is—I promise—about British narrowboating.

    Wait! What’s a Narrowboat?

    Narrowboats have been used on British canals since the Industrial Revolution. As the name suggests, they’re narrow—about 6-7 feet wide and they can be as long as 70 feet. They were originally used—much like American barges—to transport goods and coal. Nowadays, a vibrant culture and community of people living on these boats part- or full-time has sprung up. And that’s where Kris Atomic comes into it.

    Another YouTuber? Yes!

    Kris Atomic is producing a YouTube channel that’s visually engaging, interesting, and calming. Yeah, it’s not only good storytelling done naturally but also really chill. The two things (storytelling and calm) kind of go hand-in-hand. Kris Atomic avoids some of the traps of a lot of self-produced media (videos, photo accounts, and podcasts) that serve up some indie version of the same tired tropes and structures of reality shows or the pseudo-enlightenment mixed with an excessive dose of ‘look-at-me’ typical of so many PBS/NPR and PBS/NPR-inspired media.

    You walk away from this channel with a feeling that the vlogs are actually about—well—narrowboating, which turns out to be incredibly refreshing. No gimmicks or sales pitches, just the beauty of the British countryside, the challenges of navigating a life on the canal, and the interesting encounters she and her partner have with people, animals, and towns along the way. That’s not to say I would be bothered by the introduction of some way for her to get paid—the vlogs are actually more interesting and enjoyable than some media that I’m paying for (maybe I should reevaluate those subscriptions).

    Something I really like about the vlogs aside from the visuals (did I mention how beautifully filmed it all is?) is that we see a balanced version of good and bad out there on the waters. Yes, there’s trash in the canal. Yes, there are some rough days. But just as these elements aren’t hidden behind a stylized fantasy of perfection, they’re also not overblown. There’s a sense of balance and trust in the viewer’s attention span and intelligence. I look forward to more vlogs from Kris Atomic. And if you’re not already watching, you’re absolutely missing out.

    Here’s the first video in the series. The whole series is available, in order, on a playlist here. It looks like new postings happen about every two weeks.

  • 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!