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My musical tastes are currently shifting a bit. I find myself drawn toward goa trance, a genre I've known previously via a scattering of individual songs (most of them from the Matrix Trilogy) instead of via a category to lump them under. With the category, I'm now able to find new artists and more songs which fall under it. One of the artists I've found is Juno Reactor. If you remember the freeway scene (along with several others) from The Matrix: Reloaded, the music playing in the background was Juno Reactor... heavy, beat-laden, intense.

I've been listening to that soundtrack at work a good bit lately, so as part of the musical exploration this kicked off, I decided to check out Juno Reactor's other offerings. Turns out it's all pretty good stuff, most of it in the same vein as the music from The Matrix with a few twists and turns from one album to the next, enough to give each album its own atmosphere and mood.

There is one anomaly, however, one without that Matrix theme: Luciana, a single track taking up 61 minutes 20 seconds (!!) and thus an entire album. It's quite a bit different from Juno Reactor's other music, and really, quite a bit different from music in general. The cool thing is even though it takes up an entire album, it's technically still a single song, so Amazon sells Luciana for only 99 cents.

Luciana might be the best 99 cents I've ever spent on music.

It's definitely not for everybody. There are no words, and for most of the track, there is no "music", at least not as most people define music. There is a rhythm and there is an atmosphere — dark, foreboding, lost, trapped in an eternity between lifetimes. It sounds... oddly familiar, which itself seems a bit foreboding. Imagine the first 45 seconds of Pink Floyd's Welcome To the Machine before the guitar kicks in. Now, imagine that and numerous variations of that going for over an hour. That's maybe the easiest way to characterize Luciana, provided you have heard Welcome To the Machine. And if you haven't... well, you should give it a listen too just for the hell of it (and while you're at it, please tell me what cave you've been hiding in where you've never heard Welcome To the Machine).

So Luciana falls into a category called dark ambient, which I suppose will be the next avenue to explore. If the rest of it is like Luciana I might stay there for awhile.

While I'm on the topic, a quick nod to You Are Listening To New York, where ambient music is mixed with staticky NYPD police chatter to make an effective background aural soundscape. Not necessarily dark and foreboding, but perfect for drowning out office (or other) noise. Sometimes that's enough.

I thought this stretch of warm weather might be a fluke, but Mother Nature, who is infinitely more wise about such things, seems to think it's here to stay, because everything is in bloom and growing like crazy. It goes a bit beyond that, though. I'm seeing daffodils moving past the bloom stage and into the deadhead stage... which is typically a late April activity around here. Redbud trees are out in their bright purple spectacle... not too far off the mark, maybe a week or two early, but still early. I got bit by a mosquito last night, and the mosquito population doesn't usually pick up until late May. It feels and sounds like May, actually. Out on the porch in the evening, the air swells with the sound of bullfrogs and mockingbirds.

By the calendar, it is only the third day of spring... but it definitely feels like summer is right around the corner.

To apply another perspective, one week ago in 1993 we had the big blizzard — snowfall measured in feet, the world at a standstill. Twenty years later, lawnmowers are out in force and decades-old record high temperatures are getting not only broken, but obliterated.

I understand that Mother Nature is, at heart, an opportunistic bitch. I understand that if there's a chance to get seed propagated sooner (whether that seed is from animal or plant), and the conditions favor it, she's going to give it her best shot. It's been this way for hundreds of millions of years. We would probably not even exist if it were any other way. So yes, I understand. I grok it.

The only question I have is how hot it's going to be this summer. I know a week in March does not a season make, but it has been an unusually warm week after an unusually mild winter... after two very bad winters in a row. Disclaimer: I am not a meteorologist, and yes, I know it's going to cool down some starting this weekend (but still be significantly above normal). Those things aside, as a layperson, it seems quite odd that things are advancing at such a rapid clip. I'm going to assume for now that Mother Nature knows what she's doing, and meanwhile, enjoy it while it lasts (and before it becomes sweltering).

A couple of months ago there was a piece in the New York Times about Apple, Foxconn, manufacturing, and why it's being done in China instead of the United States. The net takeaway was that Chinese workers are willing to accept a much... "different" standard of living than their American counterparts, and that — plus a much more flexible supply chain — led to a significant manufacturing cost reduction. My thoughts on the New York Times piece are here.

Around the same time, NPR's This American Life aired a program which focused on the human rights side of what is essentially a business equation, specifically, human rights violations: underage workers, toxic chemicals, suicides. The New York Times mentioned low salaries, long hours, surprise midnight shifts, and company housing... but This American Life painted a grimmer picture:

Week after week, worker after worker has been climbing all the way up to the tops of these enormous buildings and then throwing themselves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner, not thinking very much about just how bad this makes Foxconn look. ... I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were 14 years old, 13 years old, 12.

And it just sits there for weeks and months at a time, month after month after month, straight 16's, sometimes longer than that. While I'm in-country, a worker at Foxconn dies after working a 34-hour shift.

As of yesterday, This American Life has issued a retraction of this story. The story was based on the account of Mike Daisey, who also relays his account via a stage production titled "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs". It turns out he fabricated many of the details in both the stage production and in what This American Life eventually aired. Specifically, he didn't speak to the numbers of people he claims, he didn't meet anyone poisoned by hexane, he may or may not have met anyone who was under the age of 13, and he didn't visit the number of factories he portrays. Ultimately, Daisey is a stage performer, and unfortunately, his information was reported as completely factual by This American Life.

Please note this doesn't mean these things aren't happening at all, it simply means Daisey's representations of them are tainted. In fact, Charles Duhigg, writer of the New York Times article along with David Barboza, says a lot of the information they used came directly from Apple:

We know from Apple's own audits and the reports that [they] have published that at least 50 percent of all audited factories, every year since 2007, have violated at least that provision. More than half of the workers whose records are examined are working more than 60 hours per week. ... David Barboza, as well as a number of translators have spoken to a number of employees in these factories and that's exactly what they say. And Apple says that as well.

And in the actual Times article:

This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple's suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.

So despite Daisey's exaggerations, misleading statements, and outright lies, I think he deserves at least some credit for raising important questions. It's worth asking where our electronic goodies come from. And if someone is working 60+ hours a week, overseas, in conditions no American worker would long tolerate, to make shiny phones and tablets we're going to swap out every year or so, I think it's worth examining that practice.

Another of those "TCB" days... fetch lawnmower from repair shop (quickly, because they're an old school shop which actually closes at 5:30). Drop same off at home. Retrieve kids from various after-school activities. Haul kids home and point them in the general direction of homework. Use previously mentioned lawnmower on lawn (and damn we're off to an early start this year). Dinner. Gather up garbage, in larger quantity than usual due to closure of the recycling center — and kudos to Andrew for wanting to help with the trash. Discover that Andrew has learned how to remove light switch covers, so put his light switch cover back on. Scold him about the dangers of playing with electrical things... this from an experienced tinkerer.

And about a thousand other minor inconveniences. This is all after a full day of work, by the way... bitch bitch bitch.

I think I'd like a day off. And I'm not talking about a day where I'm home with the kids because they're getting a day off from school at the same time. Home with the kids is not a day off, regardless of how good they're being. A day off is when I have nothing to do, and no need to find something to do. A day off is a me day, just hanging out, maybe napping, maybe watching Price is Right (except ew, it's Drew Carey now).

I think I'd like a couple of those, actually. It's been awhile.

My birthday is coming up, and I used to believe folks should get a free day off on their birthday. I still think it's a pretty good idea. Well... the world according to Brad still doesn't exist, but I do have some time saved up, and I'm thinking it's just going to pile up if I don't use it because that's how it usually happens with me. So I may be taking my birthday off this year... a mental health day, if you will.

Having expressed this, the fates shall now conspire in a way which fucks it six ways from Sunday.

I'm tempted to call it the end of an era. The recycling center at Slack Street is closed, as of today, due to the building being unsafe. There are no plans in place for it to reopen. Most likely, though, it's not going to reopen at the Slack Street location due to the renovation costs of the building.

First of all, what a shame for Charleston. Waste Management will continue picking up city residents' recycling, but since there's nowhere to take it cost effectively, it's going in the landfill. Might as well just throw everything in the trash at that point. All the official spokespeople say they're "looking for solutions" but it sounds like lip service to me. This isn't the first time the recycling center has been on the verge of disappearance. So you mean to tell me with that foreknowledge, that threat having come up before, and with no change in operations, no one thought to have a backup plan in place? I smell either a rat or mismanagement... or maybe both.

As for everyone like me living outside city limits — hauling our stuff to the recycling center was really the only option, as the deal with Waste Management only applied for folks inside city limits. I was always glad to have another option, and I knew the recycling center sold everything and made money from it, but that was fine. Still better than the landfill.

I guess a philosophical question is in order... is climate change real? From where I'm sitting, with a yard coming to life earlier each year and violent storms becoming more and more normal, I'm pretty sure the weather patterns are shifting around. Are humans the cause of it? Probably not all of it... we've only been around for a hundred thousand years or so, maybe a quarter million depending on who you ask. But that doesn't mean we should just keep cutting down trees and manufacturing new materials when there are ways to recover existing materials, reprocess them while using less money, and keep them out of the ground in the process. I like the outdoors and the ground which ultimately supports that biostructure. I don't like putting things in the ground, or on it, which might be harmful to it or to us.

Recycling should be ingrained, culturally, in everyone with roots in this state. Find any West Virginia grandfather's musty basement and I guarantee you'll find shelves filled with old Mason jars, used for canning food to sustain families through wars, depressions, and miner's strikes.

Slack Street is in an interesting part of town. Slack Street itself is barely two lanes. One side of the street is bordered by one of the mountains which make up the Kanawha Valley, the other by a set of unused train tracks overgrown with weeds and buildings. Across from the recycling center is some sort of municipal building as evidenced by the huge metal Helvetica letters on the side (gorgeous design from a forgotten era). Slack Street turns into Barlow Drive, a road with short steep hills, mostly a single lane, limited visibility, and paved pullouts for letting oncoming traffic through. In a few spots it's covered by a canopy of trees and just shy of becoming a path through the forest, an English throughway on the way to the king's castle.

The recycling center has some odd architectural elements which fit in really well with the surrounding area. It's going to cost $1.5 million just to bring it up to safety standards. So I'm glad I got a picture of these weird circles and the address of the facility carved into the masonry. If the facility isn't going to be used any longer, it will probably be razed, and this little piece of masonry will disappear. As much as I'd like to think that $1.5 million will come through, I am a realist — plus I've seen the building. I think 600 Slack Street is gone for good. Again: What a shame for Charleston.

Still in the early stages of listening to the Adele album 21, the stage where it's still discovery and wonder instead of comfortable familiarity. It's a very good album. This is not just my opinion, it's a fairly widespread one. It's logged almost half a year at the top of the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart — for whatever relevance Billboard still holds, true, but pulling off such a feat in this fickle digital era, if anything, underscores its broad appeal.

So if we accept that Adele's 21 is universally regarded as a great album (minus the opinions of a few cranks), a question: At the time she was creating it, did she realize she was creating a great work? More generally: Does any creator realize when they are creating greatness?

The fact that I even ask the question simply means I personally have never had that feeling. Which leads me to believe one of the following is true:

• I have never created a great work, or
• The feeling is not recognized easily, or
• There is no such feeling.

Now, Adele has this to say about her song "Someone Like You":

But after I wrote it, I felt more at peace. It set me free. I didn't think it would resonate with the world! I'm never gonna write a song like that again. I think that's the song I'll be known for.

I wrote that song on the end of my bed. I had a cold. I was waiting for my bath to run.

Someone Like You (Wikipedia entry)

It doesn't sound like she knew she was creating a great song at the time, though I'm pretty sure she's aware of it now. The only clues she gives are the feelings of peace and freedom after she was done with it. Unfortunately that's not very strong evidence... but it is something.

I'm not sure where to begin creating a great work. Anymore, mine are within a context... moving 36,000 database records from a legacy system to a new one, for example (something I'm in the midst of doing currently). For the task, it's a big deal. For the world at large, not so much, except for people who are tied to those records. I'll have that same peaceful feeling of freedom Adele had when she finished "Someone Like You" because it will be behind me, a task accomplished and out of the way. I don't believe any of that makes it a great work.

Not knowing where to begin doesn't exactly tip the odds in my favor, either. But that's not going to keep me from giving it a shot when — or if — I have the chance.