mweiss

I think that if Scott Holleran's review is accurate, then I'm going to be rather disappointed in this movie. I loved the early Bond movies. Goldfinger, Thunderball, all the way up to "On Her Majesty's Secret Service". George Lazenby was the best Bond actor of them all, in my opinion. He had a good balance of Aussie masculinity balanced by just enough elegance to balance the talents Bond needed as a character role. The Bond movies today are just not the same. It sounds like this latest one is a train wreck. And that title sounded so familiar, as if it were already out on film some 30 years ago. Must have been a book title.. it sounded 'deja vu' to me.

Okay, perfectly fine to react with laughter to something like that comic. One would not expect a response like the Mohammud cartoons evoked among Muslims. We're a civil philosophic school of thought here. But I do find it curious how my Jewish acquaintance is unwilling to stand in defense of Israel and Jews in general. He's ultra-Liberal left-wing. Oh well, he's lived in Boston much of his life. I guess that explains it. ;)

Hi Amy, I've only found this forum less than a week ago myself, but I wanted to say 'hi' and mention that I think you'll like the attitudes here, as compared with some of the other Objectivist forums out there. I too have heard of Terry Goodkind and although I'm not into fantasy novels as such, did peruse his web site to see what sort of stories he'd written. I'm glad to see that you were able to find this philosophy through rather unconventional means. That means there's hope that we can reach a lot more people. I've been into Objectivism for over 40 years. I see that I have the first issue, volume 1, number 1 of the Ayn Rand Letter, published in 1962. So it has been a while! Lots of gold in them back issues, and I'm starting to read them again. I came from a Christian Science background. Why, I even had my own 'glow in the dark crucifix' in the bedroom for many years. How about that? But like so many others who's curiousity ran up against the wall of silence of the church elders, I became suspicious. Nowadays, the rotten core of the Catholic Church is becoming more and more exposed, with all these priests raping young boys and what-not. That news was like the final confirmation that the whole system was corrupt through and through. Fortunately after Sunday School, my parents were too poor to send me to parochial school, so I went to public school after that. My father wanted to be a minister and was studying for the ministry, but was weak on geography and didn't make the entrance, which was a blessing in disguise. Eventually, a friend of the family introduced us all to Objectivism and it changed our lives forever. I read most of Ayn Rand's books in the 1960s. I understood them so well back then. Everything made sense. I need to read them all again and I'm starting to do that this winter. There are numerous answers to questions that I had, some of which are in the old newsletters that Rand published, and some in the books and essays that she and Nathaniel Branden wrote. I have Branden's entire lecture on Romantic Love on LP records to this day. I hope one day to sit down with my wife and listen to them, although my wife is not really into this philosophy stuff. But she sees me reading at night, so she knows I'm trying to work on self-improvement. Well, just wanted to say 'hi' and that I hope you find the answers you're looking for as well as have a good time and meet interesting people who will challenge your thought processes.

She does seem to possess quite a large amount of wisdom for her age. But then, I find that the Objectivists that I knew over the years were extraordinary people. Consider yourself a lucky man to have met someone while you are still young enough to enjoy love in all it's many glorious dimensions.

Angie, This is probably a complex psychological issue that only a great mind like Branden or Blumenthal can completely analyze and dissect, but I can state some of my own observations and conclusions, even partially-formed, in case a simpler answer can be derived. In the ‘bubble’ as you refer to it, when I am listening to a good piece of music (well, here is another area where I am fighting with mixed premises—just what IS good music, if some of the Rock I listen to is not music?) I am experiencing two emotions, one greater than the other: joy and terror. I am enjoying the melody, and the sonic smorgasbord of various sounds all working together in harmony of a sort. I am enjoying the sensation of feeling the air solidify and vibrate every bone, every piece of flesh on my person. If the bass player is doing more than just playing a bouncing bass line, perhaps playing entire allegorical melodies, I am enjoying that deeply, imagining myself plucking those strings. If the drummer is doing some particularly impressive work, I imagine myself as that drummer, just feeling the music in a way no normal listening level allows me to feel. In the ‘bubble’ of that moment, I am really not thinking that much about dangers, emotional problems or whether this is bad for me. Though sometimes at the extreme of it I am, and that’s the terror part. Expecially when I experience the sensation that I’d describe as someone taking a pin and scratching it across my eardrum, if that were possible to imagine, or when I’m listening to a pipe organ and the lower bass notes are interfering with my breathing. Both of those experiences become disconcerting. Aside from that, it seems to be a very positive experience. The only down side is that afterwards, I can’t hear much of anything and there is a low hum in my ears. When I talk, or when someone talks to me, the voice is distorted for about a half an hour or so after the listening session. I also am not at the best of my ability to concentrate, though, like a sexual release, I feel less tension and in some respects more able to focus on something other than music for the next several hours. So while the noise has slightly caused disintegration of my cognitive faculties for a while, the satisfaction of the need for it releases me from the distraction of anticipating the experience. I don’t use it consciously as a release of tension. In fact, I don’t want to listen to music when I am depressed and in a quiet mood. The best time is when I feel good, have recently had some physical outdoor activity and am in good cheer. The sense of wanting to celebrate something is the mood that is most conducing to “Bass Pigging.” That, in combination with the wife being out of the house for a few hours is the key to my entering this world. It wasn’t peer pressure in my case, but maybe acceptance. I was an unpopular person all my life, never had any real friends (which is really starting to catch up with me now that I am working in Primerica and have to go out and meet people in order to do business) and a small part of the build up of this system was ego-driven. I started out as a traveling DJ for a while, until I realized I didn’t like the music that people wanted to hear and also realized that the money wasn’t going to be what I needed to live my dream life. In the early years, it was “cool”, but as things got crazier, some friends considered me “off the deep end” and wouldn’t visit anymore. After a while, people just started to regard me as sick and deranged. So I no longer crank things up much for guests. I watch their body language carefully and when I see the hands go for the ears, or they start to double over, or give the downward-facing hand signal, I comply and back off, even though I lose the ego-reward of showing them what the system is capable of. Overall, in the “big picture,” I suspect that this behavior/need of mine is only a symptom of other things going on in my consciousness. (Gee, now we need Peikoff’s “Philosopher’s Couch” for counceling here…) I went through a severe period of disillusionment some 22 years ago, in which my endless quest for female companionship ended in a terrible breakup with a young girl that I was introduced to by a mutual friend. Whatever the case, I guess I was too old for her (she was only in her twenties at the time) and it wasn’t until later, when I read a certain Tom Clancy novel, that her character type was described to a tee and I understood who it was I dated those three times and why she did what she did, and how lucky I was that she broke up the relationship before I could be harmed by her ignominous past. But after that experience, I had a year of heavy drinking. Had a nervous breakdown, was asked to retire early from my job. It was like nuclear war had broken out, killing off all of mankind, all institutions—the world at-large—while leaving me and my possessions intact. I felt like the last man on earth. Even when amongst a crowd, I felt an accute loneliness. I still had all of my toys, but they no longer had any meaning to me. I stopped using them. Everything lost context. That relationship had been the physical manifestation of my dream relationship from the physical side of romance, and as such, it had tremendously widened my scope of capacity to experience joy, so when it was taken away, going back to my old, limited world was a contraction I could not bear. It took a year to recover enough to function again, and several more to return to ‘status quo’. But ever since then, I don’t know whether it was the year of living like a vegetable or the drinking causing brain damage, but I lost a tremendous amount of mental capacity. My closest friend confirmed that he had noted a marked change in my ability to respond in realtime conversations, and at solving problems. Where I was once near-genius at problem solving, after the ‘event’ I was sluggish and often unable to solve problems of a similar nature. The years went on, and the need for money, coupled with being unable to find a job at my age, caused me to go into my own business. I had wanted to do something related to media since I was a kid. Now, I figured, was my chance. So I set up shop as a typesetter. Failed miserably at the business end of it. So I closed that business and set up shop as a promotional media services provider, doing video and graphics. That failed to gain more than one client, the guy who remanufactured my toner cartridges. So I moved on to color prepress and had some success, but the one client I had was reluctant to give me enough work to make a living and eventually brought the design of their sell sheets and video packaging in-house with minimum wage kids working on Mac computers. I had a brief stint with a kiosk marketing company that looked promising later during that period in the mid-1990s. Things looked so good that I was on track to earn $100K that year if work kept up. That company went bankrupt and left me out $6400 in unpaid invoices. Meanwhile, I was stepping up my “criminal” activities, reviving my old pirate radio transmitters and living that dream for a while, the dream to own my own radio station. I managed to avoid the FCC, and I attracted the attention of a station broker, friendly to pirate radio, who, upon seeing my engineering design abilities demonstrated by the techical quality of the station that I had built from raw components, got me lined up with some paid radio engineering work. That lasted from 1997 to present. I was almost making a living at it by 2002. But in 2003, business dropped considerably. By 2004, my daughter was born and business dropped off more, as I was strugglng to rebuild a badly-damaged upstairs roof and walls. The house was fit to be condemned, and I was determined to make sure that my daughter would have a nice room for herself. So I started rebuilding the bathroom and then the spare bedroom, so these two important places for child-care would be spotless. This past summer, I spent long hours rebuilding 400 sq ft of flat ‘shed’ roof that had rotted from water damage and carpenter ants. Each year, I would rebuild one more room. The roof, the walls and part of the floor in each case so far. Radio work had stopped completely by this summer. Since the ‘event’ in the beginning of the 1980s, I had not only lost my passion for living, but I had also started to sleep most of the day away. It was not uncommon for me to remain asleep for 14-15 hours a day. I just didn’t have any positive incentive to get up. With the exception of December 1989, when a small dream came true and I was to head to the music store to go pickup my first MIDI musical instrument that would enable me to start getting these symphonies in my head down on tape. That morning I awoke with the excitement of a boy on Christmas morning and could not sleep. I awoke early, but knew that the music store did not open til 10am, but I got up since I was all wired up with excitement. The rest of the time, I had no interest in getting out of bed. The world of my imagination and the dream world were more comfortable for me. I also discovered Japanese animation during those years and it became an escape for me, a world in which I could vicariously enjoy honor, courage and adventure. And pretty girl heroines. At that time, I discovered the unique and beautiful music soundtracks, which would eventually lead to the creation of my weekly radio program. In this little world half a world away, I would find some intense joy. But still something was missing. If I had met my soulmate before I got to be so old that a relationship was not of the typical young boy/young girl starting a family and living happily variety, perhaps my passion for living would not have died. Even now that I have married this late in life to a woman that I adore very much, I am finding that I’m not young anymore and can’t seem to return to the giddy, schoolboy “electricity of young love” era that I once experienced with every crush I went through as a young person. I feel a diminished joy, but against the backdrop of financial problems, heavy tax burdens and a rising cost of living that underscores my forward-thinking concern for the future. I have a very strong feeling of impending doom. I put the above as a paragraph by itself because I feel that it is a clue of great importance. Like my mother before me, who woke up one day and told my father, “we’re never going to make it, are we?” and died a few years later, I feel that the world demands so much of me financially, but is incompatible with my Hedonistic world of self-enjoyment. I’m a free spirit. I cannot live in the “jail” of a 9-5 job. I’ve done it for decades and those were the most miserable years of my life. Now that I am free, I have never been happier in terms of freedom—it’s just the financial worries. The fact that for the last three years in a row, my property taxes have exceeded my gross income. The fact that I must preserve this house, because it enables me to enjoy my #1 pleasure: Bass Pig. Yet, I see that slipping away soon, to a government with trumped up clause, the tax clause… Rising costs, the world uncertainty, war, etc., all add up to this sense of impending doom that dampens my happiness. I have no clear plan to get out of this situation. Eight now, Primerica is my only hope. But I am finding it difficult to network with others, because I know few people and they are all old and out of the market for life insurance and mortgages. My month of telemarketing was a complete utter failure. Not one client and not one recruit. It is just easier to stay in bed, especially in the cold weather. I think that the desire to sleep is the desire to die. I think I have a death wish. Without passion for living, there is no living at all. I have to find out why I keep moving in the direction of failure, why I attract pain and trouble, instead of success and money. My wife calls me lazy, but I am starting to think laziness comes when you physically don’t feel the energy to move quickly and get a lot done. My mind is fuzzy, unfocused and full of noise. So much so, that a simple five minute task becomes an evening-long affair for me. My mind drifts a lot, is hard to focus on task, and lately, I have been forgetting things. This morning, I left the house without my wallet, drivers license, watch and cell phone. I’ve been burning breakfast because I forget to turn down the heat on the stove. I think it’s time I get tested for Alzheimer’s. I’m a self-centered and very selfish person. I live for myself. But I feel that sometimes I shortcutted the appropriate routes to get where I am. I made a lot of mistakes early in life. I focused on chasing after Mrs. Right for too long and with too much intensity, and it got in the way of my career, education and success. These are some of my thoughts. My biggest problem is that I can’t control my sleep problem. I came home from an early morning Primerica training meeting and went to bed again. I sleep whenever I get the chance. I can always lie down and fall asleep. That is scary. Successful people are full of energy and they almost never sleep. What the hell is wrong with me?

LoL. But a different kind of vibrator. Whether by fear or by choice, or perhaps by pain, or a combination of all three, I think I've reached my limit. Lately, for me, it is loud enough when "signal present", the first bottom tier of LEDs flicker on the big QSC power amps. It's already about 127dB at that power level and I find that I can stay in that region fairly comfortably lately. Maybe it's because I haven't acquired any really great new music that demands to be cranked up. I can only enjoy CCR's "Born On The Bayou" so many times, after all. The real danger seems to lie with new material that excites that urge to crank it til the blood squirts from my ears. Sometimes I forget about safety and the neighbors, about 1 mile from here. Last June, I discovered the wonders of the Extended Range Bass, an extension of the traditional bass guitar, with the ability to go lower than a 4-string bass. I discovered it on a Korean soundtrack to a TV series that my wife bought on DVD. I bought the soundtrack CD. The lower bass penetrated the concrete like nothing else, no rock, no disco, no jazz, could. Whenever the lowest notes were played on that song (in the upper 20Hz range), down the end of the road it was as loud as an army helicopter hovering at treetop level. The music that lives an octave above that doesn't carry that far. 'Took a walk about a quarter mile down the road and brought my sound level meter, during a playback and measured what was leaking out of the building. The SPL at the other end was 97dB. That quickly awakened me to the realization that there were potentially a lot of people in a nearby subdivision that would not appreciate this thundering sound on a frequent basis. It was interesting to discover that the type of music had a huge influence on how far the noise carried and how invasive it might be to others. I am fortunate to live in the woods in a relatively undeveloped area, save for some houses a mile north of me. There's an unoccupied cottage a 1/4 mile down the road to my west, but not much else. I'm surrounded by wetlands (swamp) to the north and east. Now while the rock music is loud, the bass notes are not as deep and don't penetrate the concrete much. But the lower notes do, or the system is just that much more powerful as frequency heads down toward 14Hz that there is more acoustic output in the 20s than in the 60-130Hz range. Either way, certainly the upper bass is more audible, immediately has more slap to the chest, and as such at lower SPLs just seems louder. So it's probably a combination of things that keep it more contained with rock music of conventional means. The reason why I suspect I haven't totally destroyed my hearing is because I avoid the most pain inducing frequencies. I choose music that has a lot of dynamic aperture (brief silence or relative quiet in between percussion hits) and where the emphasis is on bass. Lately, I listen to a lot of Reggae music, although some Reggae is start to test the waters in the sub 50Hz range of late, so it's getting more interesting for the neighbors. Frankly, high SPLs in the midrange are painful and unenjoyable. When my ears get overloaded, they tire and they start to just compress the peaks, making the music sound dull. Human hearing really doesn't like sounds in excess of 117dBa, after which, dissonant artifacts begin to emerge unless I plug my ears. I think that the longer wavelengths of bass don't make it through the ear canals as effectively, hence the ear's tolerance for higher SPLs at low frequencies is greater. That may be my saving grace. Also, the briefness of my listening sessions (at least the loudest part of them) is another saving grace. Duration and loudness are inversely related on the OSHA charts for noise in the workplace.

I have to agree with Victor on this. He is correct. The men of the mind were producers and as such, knew how to do menial tasks as well as major accomplishments of science. The comic strip conveniently overlooks that. Good point, Victor.

My brief investigatio of Lyndon LaRouche revealed that he was a Communist. And that statement, calling a person who happens to be of Jewish origin a Nazi, was really pathetic.

Normally, I would find such a strip offensive, but it must be that I have 'mellowed out' over the years. For some reason, I was able to set aside the Objectivist mindset and look at it as an outsider. Scary, huh?

I had sent some friends of mine an e-mail titlted: "Wafa Sultan : the Middle Eastern Equivalent of Ayn Rand?" One of them was a Liberal, who replied: "Mark, every time you ever mention Objectivism, this is all I can think of:" I have to admit, the comic strip had me rolling in laughter. Best laugh I've had all night. All in good fun, of course. ;)

I think my hearing is holding up pretty well, considering what my ears have been through, since my fixation started in the 70s with that exposure to the first really high powered hi-fi system. That, and the organ at Radio City Music Hall, laid the groundwork for my obscession. I had a disappointing experience last year in connection with auditioning a world-class organ at a large cathedral in Hartford, CT (I selected it because the great Berj Zamkochian played it a number of times) for a possible recording session that I was requesting to do. As a favor to me, the soon-to-be-replaced music director auditioned the organ for me, playing full stops, then just the 32' principal, then with bombards, and so on. Well I was shocked. My perception of the sound had changed enormously since 1973, when I had heard a live pipe organ at Radio City. The experience of this much-renowned "mighty" organ was diminutive--was greatly diminished from that I held in my recollections. So much had happened between now and then, that my entire sense of perspective--my sense of context--had shifted. Somehow my 'yardstick' by which I measured sound, had changed. There I stood, just a few feed from the base of the pipes, up where the console is, and the experience was like listening to a pipe organ CD with the bass rolled off. I barely felt anything at all. It didn't affect my ability to breathe at all. I even went dowstairs to the sanctuary and walked the 318' length of the facility, looking for a place where the sound might be more reinforced. I found none. That moment was an epiphany. I had verified that one's audio perspective can shift greatly over time. It became very clear to me that the manner in which I listen to pipe organ recordings was not faithful to the original--and not the least bit enjoyable to "normal" audiophiles for whom I've played such recordings. People have given me the "T" timeout signal every time, citing that they were having difficutly breathing and chest pains as it got too much. But for me, maybe I've gotten used to it, perhaps converted what they perceived as pain, to pleasure? I was considering a high grade of ear protection, but at a cost of hundreds of dollars, and due to the infrequency of my listening at any REALLY high volume levels, I generally stick with the foam earplugs that I used to use at work 20 years ago. I still come out with ears ringing, and when I'm out of foams, I stick my forefingers halfway into the ear canals, just enough to eliminate the overload distortion and the intermod (otherwise everything will sound garbled and gurggly, even my own voice, during heavy bass) so that I can enjoy the music. I avoid certain types of music that contains too much density and little dynamic aperture, preferring to hear contrast, not constant loud, but I use audio processors to restore or emphasize impact of percussive sounds, so that power snare drums are sometimes as loud as my S&W .38 Special when I'm target practicing. There may be a lot of relative quiet in between, but the percussive transients will be very loud, very exaggerated. I've not a lot of data on whether this short duration is worse for hearing safety than just constant loud screaming guitars, which may be apt to engage certain safety mechanisms in the ear. Spectrum is another major issue. There is no doubt that my tolerance for bass is more than my tolerance for mid/high frequencies. Most people are the same. Fletcher & Munson did tests of the general sample of population in the early 1950s and plotted a curve, showing hearing senstivity at various frequencies. What I've basicly done was inverter the Fletcher-Munson curve, providing increasing power bandwidth at the lower and lower frequencies. I purchased a high end sound level meter from a British manufacturer (my old Radio Shack meter only went to 126dB, but it's internal mic preamp clipped around 117dB, so wasn't useful above that) that is certified accurate to 140dB and can measure average, fast and impulse sound levels accurately. This enabled me to get a clear picture of what I'm subjecting myself to. Using the A-weighting feature was very helpful, because this puts a filter into the meter that simulates human hearing sensitivity and basically excludes the bass frequencies from the measurement. I could see that my comfortable listening level was a long-term average of 116dBa and the impulse level showed frequent peaks, when snare drums were hit, of 127dB. Things were different for the bass range. Switching the meter to "flat" response, revealed that I was starting to enjoy myself when the bass reached 135dB. Most of my friends dropped out at around 125-128dB of flat-measured SPL. Once the meter goes off the scale, ceiling tiles start to get sucked out and if the bass is very low in frequency, even I experience breathing difficulties. The carpet levitation incident occured at some unknown level way above the meter's range of measurement capability. I was 30' away to get that measurement, so the sound pressure at 16Hz must have been about 153dB at 3'. the scary part was that the amplifier output was about -30dB of full output. But I wasn't going to take it any farther, as the building was making dreadful noises and things were falling down or being knocked over. It was due to the very real danger of structural damage coupled with the discomfort of not being able to breathe, that limited my test duration. Perhaps some of the math geniuses here might be able to calculate the potentials involved. Based on area and stroke depth, I estimated that the system can displace slightly over 8,000 cu in of air at it's factory specified mechanical limits (Xmax/Xlim). (For reference, my old set of drivers would total about 300 cu in of air displaced, all together.) So the task would be to calculate the SPL in decibels if 8000 cu in of air were to be displaced 16-20 times a second in a sinusoidal manner. The math involved there is a bit over my head. I'm not one for listening to orchestral music very loud, because of the suspension of disbelief factor. I work with live orchestras from time to time making recordings, and they are not very loud, even at full crescendo levels. Knowing this, I seek to stay close to live performance levels. Also due to the fact that the dominance of upper midrange sound is going to put the ears into distortion land very soon and violins don't sound good at all when the ear starts to distort. Pipe organs, well, I've just had a habit of listening to them at way too high a level for many years and will probably continue to do so. But rock music, as long as it's amplified rock, I can believe this being very, very loud, and in reality, it's no fun unless it IS loud. I have a lot of fun with my Kurzweil K-series and PC-series synths and samplers, especially because, unlike a recorded CD, there is no compression and no limiters to take away the snap and impact of percussion instruments, so I do up a few multitrack arrangements of some of the type of rock music that I could easily imagine a group of guys playing in their garage. No heavy harmonies, no tightly-produced-for-radio sound, just the natural kind of sound one might hear if a band were playing in the basement--just drums, a Fender electric bass, a couple of Strats, a piano and a Hammond B3 through a Leslie. And then I twiddle with the velocities of the percussion parts, evoking a very powerful snare drum impact that just doesn't exist in recorded music, for instance. I play with the effects busses, adding a little tube distortion to the lead guitar, some compression to the bass, to fatten its sound, and mix the whole thing dry with no reverb at all, so that it sounds like those instruments are in the room, not a recording of a session being played back. This all goes on with no intent of financial renumeration. It's just a hobby, and, according to my wife, a waste of time. Since she's home much of the time, I don't do much more than load a Steinway piano program and sit at the keyboard and just play--at the same volume that a real Steinway would produce if it were in the room. I have two distinct listening behaviors. One is relatively normal--it's the way I listen to Jazz, Classical or New Age. But the pipe organs and the rock music wake up an animal side of me, one that craves teh visceral and the brute-ish. Thankfully, I've found that just a few minutes a week is enough to 'tire' me to the point where I can lay back on the volume and listen more normally. A static diet of the same music tends to lose me interest in high loudness levels too. But now and then, a new selection is found and if it has that certain quality that excites me, I sometimes go to extremes to enjoy it, as if sucking the life out of the musical piece. My wife just paged me. It's time to haul the artificial tree out of the cellar and begin setting it up. It's not even Thanksgiving yet, but she insists. Besides, I've probably bored most of you with all the technical jargon.

Agent Orange?

Well, actually, my intent was to discuss the philosophical aspects of my "problem/addiction" or whatever you want to call it, but I don't mind a little audio discussion too. I usually like to share this video that I took, while experimenting with the deep organ pedal tones. What happened was completely unexpected. That carpet is heavy burlap lining underneath and is not feather light: But getting back to my addiction, I think it resulted from too many years "crackin' up from a lacking of a shackin' up" as my late father used to say. The physical sensation from the bass vibration is ecstacy for me. I can't help myself. I just keep doing this. And it's become the single biggest investment. Virtually everything I do to earn extra money went into my addiction. My wife doesn't understand this aspect of my personality. It is often a bone of contention between us. I do listen to a lot of Classical music, although I think I only have Mahler's First Symphony. I'm more of a J.S. Bach fanatic. His Toccattas, Preludes & Fugues, etc., are hypnotic. I love recreating them on the Kurzweil synthesizers for my own enjoyment. As you can tell, music is a major passion, both creating, arranging and listening. I'm just concerned about certain extremes that I may never be able to cure.

When my wife used the phrase, “that’s not music anymore,” it stuck in my head. She was referring to some pipe organ piece I was playing, which was shaking the whole house and terrifying the guests upstairs, who were visiting on the 17th of September, for a celebration and BBQ party. Of course, I had an audiophile friend, Cole, longtime friend of the family, dating back to before the Class of ’48, in attendance. I had not seen Cole since 1976, when he “poisioned” me with his then-enourmous sound system in a small livingroom. What I had refined and developed was something akin to the “Thompson Harmonizer” as described in Atlas Shrugged, but with the ability to play a wide range of pitches, thus reproduce music as well as infrasonic waves. For more than thirty years, I focused much of my available attention span to improving, refining and developing a sound system that could literally knock me off my feet. With the development of new technology by a small group of firms in Texas and Illinois, I began negotiations to obtain prototypes nearly one year ago… For thirty years, I had this uncontrollable desire to be brutally beaten up by soundwaves. Standing in front of a “Marshall on eleven” wouldn’t do it for me. Headphones were out of the question. I wanted the thrill of coming within inches of death by pulverization, such as standing inside the cowling of a Pratt & Whitney jet turbine at full throttle. Everything I built, every speaker cabinet design, every amplifier circuit I tested, was done with that seeminly unattainable goal in mind. Back to that fateful day in June of 2006. Four prototypes arrived. Even though some neighborhood kids had set fire to the house across the road from me, amidst all the bustle of fire engines and fire crew, I had no interest in stopping what I was working on to go watch a house burn to the ground. With maniacle single-mindedness, I proceeded to install the four prototypes. I was anxious to begin testing and to find out whether this new technology would be more hype than real, or whether it would be another evolutionary step on the ladder of sound, allowing me to go lower and louder than anything previous. I was in for a little surprise that I did not expect. But I would not fully comprehend the scope of it until I stood 2/10th of a mile from the house on June 30th, 2006 and had a disconcerting awakening. By the 30th of that month, I had carried out another phase of a plan that I had set into motion a few months earlier: the purchase of two of the world’s most powerful audio amplifiers. These beasts were bought from a touring company, the kind that sets up sound at the Superbowl and other huge venues. As such, they would test the limites of residential electric service, to say nothing of the 3-foot thick reinforced concrete walls of the former bomb shelter-turned-sound studio. There I stood, at the other end of the road, realizing that the earth itself was vibrating. There was no containing the infrasonic energy. It was like testing a nuclear weapon in the cellar, only with the advantage that I could control the intensity of the destructive power. It was at this point that I had my first ephiphany: I had gone too far this time. It was an all or nothing proposition. Either I stuck with the conventional technology and “almost enough but not quite” to feed my ever-growing addiction, or I openly welcome the new technology, as dangerous as it was, and learn to develop the ability to self-regulate my appetite for being bodily shaken and pounded by my music. My second ephiphany came when a couple of friends had stopped by to help me with some renovation work I was doing that summer. One friend wanted to hear the music, so he cautiously entered the studio, like a frightened animal, curious about the fire before him, and once he was settled in, I increased the volume from what I considered ‘background’ level, to something more attention-getting, but before I reached the plateau I had intended on, he dashed out of the studio. The other friend described the look of terror on this man’s face as he exited the room. Hey, I wasn’t even starting to have fun yet! The third ephiphany happened during the introduction of the 32’ organ pedal stop to Also Sprach Zarathustra. Since my audiophile friend whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years almost to the day was present, this was like the great meeting of Bass afficianodos. Now you have to realize that my wife, and another Filipino friend of hers had both experienced earthquakes in Manila and Taiwan more than once. They were upstairs while I started to raise the volume of this normally-inaudible sound that was more felt than heard. Dust started to rain down from the ceiling, walls and ceiling started to make ugly stress noises and the equipment racks, with 700lbs of amplifiers in them, started to sway back and forth from some inaudible sub-harmonic. It was about then when my friend signaled to cease ramping up the level and quickly faded the music down before the trumpet fanfare came in. It wasn’t soon enough though. My very angry wife appeared, having raced down from upstairs, and read the Riot Act to me. I received a 20-minute lecture, telling me that there was something wrong with me, that I had to listen to something at such a level that the house would quake like that. She stated, “that’s not music.” That stuck in my mind. Like an alcoholic who can’t control his drinking, or the drug addict who moved on to ever more dangerous and powerful drugs, I became somewhat disturbed over the “outside, looking in” view that I had gotten a snapshot of from my wife. For just a fleeting moment, I saw my craziness from an outside perspective. That’s when I started to have reservations about whether this latest rounds of refinements to the Monster was a mistake. I began to weigh just what the value of something I can’t use to it’s fullest capacity, and even when I do use it to some capacity, can’t use it more than a few minutes a week. Was the ecstacy worth it? It had become an exercise in the absurd. I would listen to some rock music at levels louder than a Ted Nugent concert before OSHA laws started putting limits on loudness at rock concerts, and really I was using 1/10,000th of the systems power reserves. Oh well, at least I had the guarantee of knowing that only my ears were distorting. But all the more absurd was the purpose of all that power when listening to Jazz, or a violin concerto. It was like taking an X-1 rocket plane and taxiing it on the runway all day long. My only saving grace was that I kept my durations for the loudest listening to as brief as possible. But even so, the damage to my hearing over the years cannot be denied. But little to no data exists on the effects of very low frequencies at extreme pressure levels on the human body. They simply don’t exist at rock concerts or in discos. I’m playing around in uncharted territory. Now I’ve been asking myself over the year, what are the philosophical implications of my actions? Do I justify it like cigarette smoking, knowing that I’m doing harm to myself, but that the pleasure outweighs what I perceive to be the dangers? Or am I acting immorally on the grounds that I am taking an anti-life action against my body every time I subject myself to the music? The simple fact is, that I can’t stop. But it IS like sex in that once you get your fill, you actually don’t want anymore for a while. The dizziness, the temporary inability to hear, the nausea, and the shaky nerves all signals from the body that it’s time to quit for now and go sit down at the computer and do something that doesn’t involve sound. And as a corollary to this issue, is the spread in musical content. Some of it is somewhat embarassing to admit to listening to. After all, screaming guitars and pounding percussion are supposed to be the staple of mindless drug addicts and acid rock, right? Somewhat peculiar is my tendency to at one moment be listening to Tommy Dorsey, and the next moment be listening to B.B. King, or Three Dog Night, or Bob Marley and the Whalers. I still view it like a dirty little deed that one has to do but not admit to and chaulk it up to a matter of moods. There are times when I’m in heaven listening to a symphony with a complex and varied theme—like it’s telling a story and taking me on a virtual journey. But there are other times when I have a gutteral need for some pounding percussion, screaming Hammond B3 organ and screaming guitars. Pretty weird. I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe it keeps my arteries from hardening, who knows? All I know is that there’s this nagging feeling that I associate with this activity that is unique to me and no one else, and that is an urge to check my premises. Self-Destruction for Pleasure. Because it FEELS good. Now that’s a Hedonistic reason if I ever did hear one!

Interesting article. Normally, I would have written off RAP completely, but I have an associate, probably one of the brightest broadcast engineers in the country, who states that he likes RAP. When I interjected that he sure MUST be joking, he indignantly retorted that he grew up in Brooklyn, NY, in "da 'hood" as he calls it, and that he understood the problems of life in the ghetto and that RAP gets those feelings out, talks about it in intelligent ways. Now here is this article, ostensibly by an Objectivist, giving the time of day to RAP and going even further to hold it in what seemed to be pretty high esteem. Personally, I found the few that I've heard from passing cars with their "boom car" sound systems to be disgusting, like pieces of bloody road kill on the side of a highway. This associate and friend of mine gives me and my wife "gifts" of RAP albums from time to time. I have tried to make sense of some of it, but frankly, it just doesn't have the 'sense of life' that I like. I've tried to understand the lyrics of JELLEESTONE's "We da Niggas", but I just don't see the point of it. What would Ayn Rand say? I think that's a rhetorical question.

Interesting timeline. I think this will inspire me to go back through my old and yellowing copies of The Ayn Rand Letter, The Objectivist and The Intellectual Activist and see what I can find about this schiszm.

Hi Michael, It seems like religion has only started making a lot of headlines since the Bush administration. Back when I went to school, we went to a little red building with a bell tower and four classrooms. The teachers taught the basics, reading writing and 'rithmatic. We only had the pledge of allegiance. No religion. Of course, when I was much younger, I went to Sunday School under Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. But later, in public schools, I saw no religion outside of my parochial schooling earlier. The scary part is that today, the purveyors of religion are becoming brazen and bold and coming out of the woodwork all over the place, like maggots from an infested log which, from the outside, looks relative intact.

Excellent points, Judith. I agree. These are the asthetic principles that I got from Objectivism. Back in '65-69, when we had our little Objectivist discussion group at the house, there was a young man of 19, who was into pot smoking, acid rock and going nowhere with his life. He worked in a stock room. That was before Objectivism. After a year of learning Objectivism, he stopped smoking pot, started listening to Classical music, and he figured out how to design an electronic timer circuit for our dishwasher, replacing the mechanical one that failed. Later, he became an engineer and works at IBM today in a very highly-paid position. I dread to think how his life would have turned out were it not for Objectivism. I myself have little contradictions in my esthetics. Why do I not only like Camille saint-saens, but also Creedence Clearwater Revival, cranked up to blood-curdling levels? I live with this esthetic inequality, much as a closet gay person lives with his gayness, realizing it's probably wrong. That said, when Leonard Peikoff had his radio show, I was surprised to see that he had picked Phil Collins, a British rock singer, as his choice of bumper music. I didn't know what to think. There is Miss Rand, with her "tiddlywink music" as she called it in "A Sense of Life." What to think? That's one reason why I'd like to consult with Allan Blumenthal. I am a Bass-a-holic. Shame on me.

Gee, that is a tough one. I've always visualized Dagny as looking a bit like Vivien Leigh, but softer and more beautiful. Jodie Foster is a good kid, but I can't get over her 'trailer park' souther accent. She'd have to lose that before I could visualize her in this role.

I see evidence of religion popping up all over the place now. Today on Hennikan & White, they were talking about a NJ school teacher who was preaching in class in public high school to the effect that if anyone doesn't believe that Jesus died for our 'sins', then they were going to Hell. A student recorded the lecture and the school is defending the teacher, but some parents are upset about it.

You don't like Dr. Peikoff much, do you? You seem to have a horroresque image of him. Might I ask why?

I read the first few paragraphs and skimmed the rest. Yes, somewhat funny, but I didn't feel like wasting my time reading the whole article. I can see it's a really BAD parody of Miss Rand's life, and even makes a juvenile stab at Frank's abilities as an artist. (I guess you can tell that I held Miss Rand in pretty high esteem. Even after all these years, I still have the highest respect for her work, despite what the Brandens have said about her, true or not.)

Hi Ellen, Even though I don't regard myself as a Libertarian, since anarchy is a practical contradiction and nature abhores a vacuum--especially when it is a society without a strong governing body, I may be inclined to visit that discussion group. I have been involve anonymously on several anarchy, anti=government discussion forums in years past, mainly pointing out the flaws in pure anarchy. Those were some of the stubbornest people I have ever met.

Hello Ed, I've run across your web site in the past, probably from a link from OOL. Thanks for bringing them to my attention. Tolerant, perhaps, and I get a distinct sense that this is one of two distinct camps that have formed after the 1968 breakup of Rand and Branden. Oh, what I would have given to have been a fly on the wall at that fateful meeting betwen them. If I could know the truth before I die, then perhaps my life would be complete.

Disgusting. Must have been written by a Liberal. Even the picture was a terrible PhotoShop chop job. I was NOT amused.