A Return to the Basics of Humanity

 After purging my moxy writing about the fall of Donald Trump, I retained some residual emotional energy meant for positivity.  This impetus was meant for a brief reflection on human sexuality, something of which we read or see little anymore.  With the availability of the internet, which has changed the modern world, many things have suffered.  Commercial music was destroyed, because with the advent of a small networking idea by Shawn Parker and Sean Fanning, Napster, widely it became expected that music is free.  How could music be free to a consumer?  To expect such a thing, the content and source of music would have to be cheap.  Cheap music?  Well, that is what we have now.  Cheap music.  If one expects something to be free, then still we get what we pay for.  What we have at our disposal is cheap.  It is cheap in quality.  Perhaps it is not cheap in content, because viable recorded music sustains the test of time. (until a huge fire at Universal in Hollywood)  Music cannot be free like air.  It is not created by mother nature, although God has a lot to do with it.  To create music it takes substantial resources.  Music must be composed, engraved, learned, performed, and then recorded.  To do all of these things many artists are involved.  This harmony of events became a seminal part of American culture and of the American economy.  At one point the commercial music industry in America usurped the movie and television industry in revenue, until Napster.  Their novel idea that MP3 representations of original audio files contained on compact discs, albums, and cassette tapes could suffice for the original content, and they did.  They have for a long time, because these lesser quality audio files easily were transferable from computer to computer.  These two men created an internet protocol that allowed users to share music files.  These files were free.  The lure of free music, no matter what its quality, was too strong to resist.  Almost overnight music commodity changed to the personal computer, and people stopped buying music.  I will admit that the PC simply is the best music player.  During a different time an industry existed that supported the quality enjoyment of recorded music through sound.  It was called Hi-Fi, short for high fidelity.  The quest for the best playback of prerecorded music was bonafide, an an industry grew to support it.  (like many things American)  What a blast from the past.  This was an enjoyable time in American history, and rightly so because the  product it yielded was tangible.  Live music recorded well and played through a quality reproduction system provided a superior, uplifting, and enjoyable experience.  It is unfortunate that our millennial generation missed this.  It is not too late.  I embraced the conversion to the PC as my music play back device, because I was working on cruise ship.  I resisted at first, but then iTunes revealed itself as the perfect work aid to study and archive music.  It helped me doing my job, and I used it extensively.  I still do, because there is no more convenient method of storing music.  Ironically in my home CD's are useless.  There is so much vibration in the air from military and rail activity, CD's skip.  I have tried to remedy this flaw to no avail.  You can isolate a player from its base with dampening, but you cannot isolate a machine from the air surrounded it.  We live in air and so do our machines.  If it were possible to build a vacuum, a bubble devoid of air, then I could play CD's, and they would not skip.  Alas I gave up.  I stopped playing CD's, because of the sheer frustration involved.  In the interim I have tried many methods.  My music process has ebbed and flowed until finally I arrived at a process.  The PC or personal computer is the best sound playback device for accuracy, but you must use an external audio interface.  It was big news when the Macintosh computer began shipping with a built in audio interface.  The audio In/Out sufficed for converting digital files to analog for listening.  Unfortunately on the Macbook Pro the 1/8" headphone jack is a weak spot on the motherboard.  Often it comes unsoldered and fails to play sound.  A simple USB audio interface is all you need to convert your digital files back to analog for listening.  I discovered a wonderful sounding unit that costs $100.00.  It is the Presonus Audiobox of which I have two.  Its sound quality is superb and surpasses the fidelity of most commercially available CD players, which have become dinosaurs.  The benefit of a PC is a hard drive, which is a precision engineered device better than most audio products.  These too have succumbed to the Chinese market, and the quality of Seagate drives like many electronic products, no longer stands up.  Things are not what they used to be.  Steve Jobs realized this when he invented the iPod music player.  Unfortunately storage still was an issue, and the necessity of MP3's limits the users potential enjoyment of musical content.  When my first Macbook Pro fried its graphics chip, because Apple began using cheap products, I was forced to replace it.  This time I was careful to choose a machine that had a tried and true track record for longevity.  When I purchased this computer it came with a massive internal hard drive in terms of storage capability.  I didn't know what I would do with all of this space.  It was several years later finally I figured it out.  Video files do take up space, but I never aspired to store video on the computer.  My DVD collection is substantial, and I stand behind it.  Music on the other hand had moved to the PC.  In my return to a quest for the best possible listening experience, I made a concrete decision to abandon the MP3 file forever.  In comparison an MP3 files fails miserably when compared to the warm analog experience of a vinyl LP.  My turntable from the days of yore long had given out, although I was able to resurrect it for the period of one year, long enough to record some vintage Christmas music.  I was successful at replacing it, although it was difficult.  The swarmy environment of Amazon, or rather the discrepancies of product qualities with their descriptions on their website, is challenging.  You don't know who to believe.  It takes a myriad of research to find the best product.  Brand names have been purchased and no longer are the products they once were.  I found a Teac turntable which was a return of some kind but new in the box.  It turns out the AC adapter or power supply or wall wart was defective and didn't work.  Upon arrival I was able to fix this device easily, and the turntable seemed to work well.  A year or so later I replaced the stylus or cartridge with a better one.  This choice also was daunting.  It is at times like these when a brick and mortar store shows it worth.  You need to be able to hear the product's sound in person.  When I did finally find success with reassembling my stereo audio system, the turntable revealed a sound on my old vinyl recordings that almost was unbelievable.  It was sound I had not heard since the 1980's, warm, alive, and pleasurable.  In a nutshell audio has become a metaphor for human sexuality.  I would be so bold to say that sexual pleasure in the year 2020 is a shadow of what it once was for the same reasons.  That is humorous.  Are we lesser beings?  Have our components been pared down to the bare essentials for economic reasons?  Music mostly is free now, and consequently it reflects its value.  It sucks.  I would assume that if the same shortcuts have been taken with humanity, our resulting experiences are similar.  Maybe they still suck, but certainly they do not yield a fraction of what once they offered.  I am positive this is true.  Take a look at any B grade soft core skin flick on Showtime late at night.   To whom would this appeal?  They are terrible.  Soft core pornography at its worse.  Soft core pornography in its heyday was on film and television, not the internet because like music the product is contingent upon production.  It takes tools, knowledge, skill, and artistry to produce both.  If you curtail this traditional approach, a substantive hierarchy of production methodology and accompanying tools, you won't have much.  We have what we have, and 2020 is a cold flaccid tit.  Luckily like art there is so much more to discover.