don’t,” I tell him.
But Dominick’s question gnaws at me.
The recording engineer Lars Fox made an interesting remark to Rolling Stone magazine a few years back.
“If you’re fifteen,” he said, “you’ve probably never heard a shitty drum performance.”
While there is certainly less-than-stellar percussion work on the airwaves, he makes a good point.
Back in the day, when Roy Orbison or Johnny Cash or Elvis Presley went into a studio, engineers recorded their respective bands playing the songs together live. Whole albums were laid down over long weekends. Drummers did not even wear click-track headphones. There was very little post-production. If someone sucked, they sucked – there was no place to hide.
This is no longer the case. Skipped beats can be repaired. Tempos can be shifted. Flubbed notes can be erased. Wavering vocals can be corrected. And in an increasingly intricate mastering process, recordings are compressed to be as loud as possible without losing integrity (which is why when you play an Elton John cd after an Amy Winehouse cd, you have to jack up the volume).
The result, as Lars astutely pointed out, is this: Every piece of music we hear is technically perfect.
A human being, it’s said, cannot draw a perfect circle freehand. We all know intuitively what a circle is, but without the aid of a compass – and even with a compass, is a penciled-in figure really 100% accurate? – we cannot replicate one.
But with Photoshop, I can render a perfect circle at will.
A century and a half ago – the year the Civil War began – most of the technology we take for granted did not exist. Cameras were rudimentary and expensive. The railroad had just begun its ascendancy. Medicine was a joke. There were no “moving pictures,” no color photographs, no glossy magazines, no television, no radio, no automobiles or highways on which to drive them, no airplanes, telephones, or Internet. There was not much appreciable difference between life in 1860 and life in 1760, or 1660, or even 1560.
How long would it take for a boy entering puberty in 1860 to see the undressed body of an attractive woman? There were more paintings than photographs of nudes, and those paintings hung in museums far, far away, so our boy would have to catch a glimpse of an actual flesh-and-blood female. If he didn’t spy on girls at a swimming hole, or visit a brothel, he might not feast his eyes on the feminine form in all its glory until the day he got married (or the day he knocked up the girl he would be forced at gunpoint to marry).
And if he did get lucky and beheld a bathing beauty, what would she look like? What are the chances that she would be pretty, even by 1860 standards? And in what scenario could he drink in that image at his leisure, unconcerned about being caught in flagrante delicto , like that mythological deer in the headlights, Actaeon? Chances are, our pubescent boy will live his entire life and witness precious few ladies en déshabillé .
I just typed in “naked celebrities” on Google and was led to a site called Celebrity Pink, on which are images of Kim Kardashian fornicating with Ray J; the beautiful bare bosoms of Charlize Theron, Rihanna, and Megan Fox; and Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan with mouths full of metonymical manhood.
Not only do I have unfettered access to images of female nudes, the nudes are doing things that would have made our Civil War – era lad blush. And they are all drop-dead gorgeous. Perfect women at my DSL’d fingertips.
McMansions are, objectively speaking, nice places to live. They offer every amenity a fairly well-off American could ask for: plenty of square footage, a flowing floor plan, ample storage space, walk-in closets, three-car garages, Jacuzzi tubs, lofted ceilings, fireplaces, central air conditioning. All the corners are square; all the walls are level; all the doors are squeakless. These houses are a sort of Greatest Hits of
Kit Tunstall, R. E. Saxton