Not Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Macbeth X-Series MKII Backend Filter - Eurorack

After a nearly five-year wait, my Macbeth Eurorack synthesizer combo is complete. In April 2020, within a brief five or ten-minute window of being able to order before they sold out, I managed to snag a spot on the waiting list for a very rare offering of an updated X-Series MKII Oscillator and Filter from maestro of custom synthesizer manufacturing, Ken Macbeth. In October 2023, I was notified by Schneidersladen in Berlin, Germany, that I had a number of days to wire the funds to their bank or lose my hold on the oscillator. I have to say, I wanted to be reluctant as there was no certainty that the filter would ever be completed, and I seriously wanted the pair. I paid anyway, and less than a week later, the oscillator arrived at my front door.

Exactly a week ago, I received the invoice for the hoped-for filter; it was finally ready to ship. Fifteen minutes later, the money was wired to Berlin, and that shipment was sent the next day. It arrived in the U.S. by Thursday, but a snowstorm in Kentucky kept it there until UPS could deliver it to Arizona on Sunday and then to me today. This brings me to over 20 oscillator voices to play with, and there’s not one I’d part with, as each has its unique tonal qualities, but the warm depth of the Macbeth combo is unsurpassed.

In other news, yesterday was our 31st anniversary, and Happy New Year.

December Morning Walk

House decorated for Christmas

The astute will see this Christmas-drenched trickery as a transparent act of trying to make up for lost ground after not posting for more than a month by backdating this missive. Maybe I’ll be called out for dating this post December 9th, when it wasn’t published until January 8th, as though I hoped that no one would notice that my posting frequency had fallen off a cliff. Well, as my then-teenage daughter once told me once, “You can suck it!”

It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say; it’s just that I’ve been busy. Let me rephrase that: I’ve been beyond busy. I’ve been absolutely consumed since November 4th working (toiling is more apt), writing this thing I want to believe is an evolving novel. Writing is all I do while I’m living in a zone, neglecting everything else and focusing exclusively on finding my way into the story, which is unfolding into an ever-expanding document that now contains so many words that it likely exceeds most humans’ ability to express such a number. Santa promised that if I wrote like the wind, he’d not fill my notebook with coal, and so, like one of his slavish elves, I work every day for others’ future enjoyment…

Pinnekjøtt

Pinnekjøtt with rutabagas, potato, carrot mash and mushy peas

The food just gets uglier here in the Wise household as we do our best to escape the gravitational pull of traditions. Not only did we skip the turkey, which had the knock-on effect of leaving us without leftovers, but we cooked up some dried-out six-month-old mutton that was likely dispatched in springtime, salted, and then hung in the rafters of somewhere in Norway before becoming this Scandinavian holiday favorite called Pinnekjøtt. Five pounds of funky dried sheep ribs exuding a slightly peculiar (not pleasant) cheese-like stench sat wrapped in a paper bag, stinking up our place for over a month. Before you ask, no, we didn’t seal it in a bag and risk it molding; it needs air to breathe, nor did we put it in our fridge, as it’s never been in one anyway.

Cooking it, on the other hand, that was where the experience got real. To me, it smelled like we were cooking the corpse of the infamous Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who influences how I say the word Pinnekjøtt, which Caroline insists is pronounced: “PIN-neh-SHOHT.”

Enough of the semantics. First, we soaked the sheep ribs overnight. Then, we simmered them for nearly three hours. Oops, this was the first mistake, as that amount of time was meant to cook more than we were preparing. From there, I put them on our barbecue, trying to bring them to a crispiness, not the dried-out slivers of meat and charred fat we ended up with. It’s a good thing we have another three pounds that can linger in our apartment until Christmas, when we take a different approach to preparing them instead of just throwing them away while they continue insulting our olfactory.

Thanksgiving Seal

Canned seal meat from Newfoundland, Canada

I’m calling this bowl seal meat because I don’t want to admit that Caroline and I have taken to eating dog food so we can better afford our exorbitant travel expenses. For the astute, they’ll notice a stunning lack of photos from the Oregon Coast this Thanksgiving (a possible first), all because we cannot afford the life we’ve come to expect. Don’t feel too sorry for us; we had started with dry kibble, but the constant crunching of enough dry food to satiate us was driving me nuts. Any of you who know me will realize I have an incredibly low tolerance for things I don’t want to hear, such as others talking to interrupt my sermons.

Rrrzzzzt….rewind the tape here; where is the lie and the truth? Everything after the seal meat reference is questionable because this is legit seal meat. We’d dragged a jar of it back with us from Newfoundland, and it just continued to get uglier in our pantry. Seeing how we were skipping our annual Coastal Oregon pilgrimage due to travel fatigue and that I wasn’t about to go all traditional Thanksgiving dinner, why not break out that jar of seal meat we’ve been saving for a special occasion? That’s just what we did.

Because people have asked, I pan-seared it in butter, onion, and garlic with the guidance of one of my many Artificial Intelligence overlords that steers my life after I have given up my autonomy, and then I added beef broth, rutabagas, potato, and carrots for an authentic taste of Newfoundland. Searing it emphasizes the umami taste, while stewing it allows for tenderizing the meat, bringing out its rich, gamey flavors. That’s what the A.I. told me to share, so yes, that last sentence was cut and pasted.

Seriously, though, Caroline and I both enjoyed our first taste of seal, which surprised us. While we couldn’t be at the sea this year, we could still partake in its bounty as though the sea came to us.

Voting in a Black & White World

Caroline Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

This vote of serious consequence was the first presidential election in which Caroline had the opportunity to participate. Adamant that she would vote in person due to this fact, we had not sent in our mail-in ballot and were holding out for November 5th, that is, until I accepted one of the many election phone calls I’ve been inundated with. The volunteer from Chicago on the other end of the line made a short spiel about getting out to vote, and I assured him that we would be voting next Tuesday. Then he asked why we were waiting. I explained how my wife wanted to be there in person and not mail or drop off her ballot, and he informed me that we could vote in person today if we chose to. He offered that I could look at the website I Will Vote to find a polling place near us. Wow, finally, an unwanted call that turned out to be incredibly helpful.

At the polling station, there were far more people voting than we’d expected, considering it was about 9.30 a.m. on a weekday, almost a week before the official election day. Things went mostly smooth, except for this one guy (because there had to be that one guy) in line behind us, who asked the polling official at the door if they were going to lose his ballot like they did last time and then told her that he was going to photograph his ballot as he waved his phone at her. She calmly informed him that he would not and that it was against federal law. She then pointed him to read one of three signs next to her. The funny thing was, once inside, he was having problems with his ballot due to inconsistencies with his address. At that point, he admitted to the volunteer trying to help him with the computer that he’d only recently become a U.S. citizen and hadn’t yet updated his address on his I.D. So, his anger issues outside were nothing more than theatrics for him playing the drama of a petulant child. We can all guess who he was there to vote for, and I can assure you that it wasn’t the woman we were both voting for.

Election Vulgarities

Election sign in Phoenix, Arizona

If there was any hint that on our margins, we Americans have, to some extent, become a trash society. Our current political climate seems to show that a plurality of us are fully entrenched in a race to a level of cultural vulgarity that proves beyond any doubt that we are a nation of idiots falling into hate. While mudslinging has always been part of the fabric of politics around the world and throughout history, there seemed to be a time and place for the exchange of grievances. Today, we have returned to a time where we engage the mob in an attempt to foment the most amount of rage.

Election sign in Phoenix, Arizona

When I call us a “trash society,” what I mean is that instead of having a commonality of education that allows us to see each other as more-or-less equal, we have become a polarized people of better-educated citizens able to adapt to the rapid shift in demands for intellectual flexibility and those who have failed to embrace the demands of an economy that requires intelligence able to evolve in response to the incredible speed of change that is part of modern life. Those who are failing themselves are a volatile lot; they are easy to anger and ignored for long enough there is some likelihood they will bring revolution, one that will not serve those of us who have enjoyed the prosperity that arrived with adaptability. Looking at the Russian Revolution and subsequent Red Terror, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and to some extent, Nazism in Germany, these movements shared something ugly in common, and that was that they targeted government officials and bureaucrats, military officers, nobility/aristocrats, wealthy merchants/landowners, religious leaders/clergy, intellectuals, professors, teachers, journalists, writers, artists, cultural figures, lawyers, judges, doctors, scientists, union leaders, political opponents, ethnic minorities, foreign nationals, wealthy peasants/farmers, student activists, civil society leaders, librarians, publishers, bankers/financiers, diplomatic corps members, police officials from previous regimes, urban professionals, social reformers, and democracy advocates.

Election sign in Phoenix, Arizona

I do have to give credit to a number of people who are proponents of accelerationism and the Dark Enlightenment movement. They look to push forward a collapse, believing that democracy is inefficient and leads to societal decay, traditional hierarchies and authorities should be restored, progressive social movements are destructive to civilization, technology and capitalism should be unleashed from democratic constraints, universities and media constitute a “Cathedral” that enforces progressive orthodoxy, and that the Enlightenment and its values were a historical mistake. That’s a ridiculously compressed version of the accelerationist movement, but you get the idea. Without dedicating thousands of words to the complexity of all sides of this desperate situation and those who are being used as pawns in a battle of wealth and power, I have to leave this here with my sad recognition that the vulgarities displayed on the streets of Phoenix are battle weapons, sowing division and mistrust between the diverse population that makes America a great country.