Screw Loose Chronicles

Sunday, January 4, 2009

21st Century: Decade 2

Welcome To The Future ... What Will We See?

The next decade is certain to bring innovations that will change our lives. Predictions include but not limited to the following technologies and discoveries:

Super thin video display technologies: OLEDs, (Organic Light Emitting Diode) laser projection, and something new called Trans Luminescence
Broadband 3-D ready television becomes ubiquitous
Discovery of microbiological and/or primitive plant life outside earth
Distinction between computers and TVs disappear
Domestic robots available for disabled/elderly
Real time two way video becomes common
United States has socialized medicine
Wireless HD Internet everywhere
US moves to new currency

Saturday, January 3, 2009

The Sweet Sound Of Vacuum Tubes

Vacuum tubes are legacy electronic components that were used for amplification and switching tasks in radio, television and telephone industries up through the mid-twentieth century. In some cases they replaced electromagnetic relays giving rise to the first "machines" including computers without moving parts. Vacuum tubes continue to be manufactured in 2009 for specialty applications where performance is superior to transistors and integrated circuitry (i.e. high-end audio, guitar amplifiers, high power radio broadcasting) and for aesthetic reasons. Tubes are not without disadvantages including high voltage requirements, excess heat output, shorter life span, and higher cost compared with solid state devices. Unlike solid state components that simply die when something goes wrong, vacuum tubes weaken over time until they need to be manually replaced by a technician or the end user. Despite theses disadvantages, when vacuum tubes work, they perform their task in such a way as to improve the quality of recorded music, to accurately reproduce even the most delicate musical passages without coloration.

Friday, January 2, 2009

Flashpoint: San Francisco 1967

Photographer unknown

The year, the moment, the place that counterculture reached a tipping point. Turn on, tune in, drop out. The flower children sprouted and what an interesting ride it has been. (Click on the above photo to enlarge and travel back in time 42 years to witness amazing sharpness and color fidelity)

Tribute To Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith was born around 1895 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. At the time African-Americans were looked upon as not being worthy of birth records so her exact birth date is uncertain. All that is known of her early years is that she grew up in extreme poverty. Singing in the streets for change at the age of ten, she joined a travelling show featuring "Ma" Rainey, an experienced Blues singer that knew all of the ropes. Bessie played "on the road" for eleven years before making her first acoustic horn (non-electrical) recording in 1923. Her first record sold 780,000 copies, but only made her $125. Dubbed "The Empress of the Blues," her singing embodied the Blues while her songs, drawn from her world be damned lifestyle, rang true with rural and urban audiences alike. Eventually she purchased a private railroad car so she could have eating and sleeping facilities on the move as well as privacy during segregated times. Her lyrics belt out stories of reefer and gin and the pain of love and bad men that did her wrong and left her down and out. Bessie's music inspired many 20th Century artists including Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin. Tragically killed in a 1937 car crash in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Bessie Smith continues to sing in 2009 through her recordings.

Bessie's final resting place remained unmarked until 1970 when Janis Joplin in tandem with Columbia Records paid for her tombstone.

Photo by Edward Elcha, 1923.