Dennis Wyman has a Blog

A few weeks ago, the internet was abuzz with a viral marketing campaign staged by Warp Records to announce the long-awaited newest album by electronic music duo Boards of Canada. Their first full-length album since 2005, entitled Tomorrow's Harvest, is due June 10th. And while their fans are going nuts, one thing the stunt has brought attention to is the mystique that surrounds the group.

Started in the mid-80's by brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, Boards of Canada has built a reputation for being secretive - usually releasing albums with very little advertising and few interviews given to the press. This coupled with a painfully slow release schedule (seven years have passed since the release of their last EP, Trans-Canada Highway) has created an incredible demand for any material or news from the group, which when released is immediately jumped on by the Twoism fan forum and catalogued by the bocpages wiki. Safe to say, Boards of Canada fans are a seriously devoted bunch, but it leads a lot of people outside these circles of fans to wonder, "Why?"

Your basic law of supply and demand snowballs to an almost exponential level with these guys. It's a well known open secret that the group has roughly half a dozen unreleased albums that nobody can seem to get a copy of. These are things that fans dwell on during seven years of silence, and why they start placing bounties on them being found. This is what drives fans to start concocting theories on entities related to the band like the "Hexagon Sun" collective, which depending on who you ask, is either the duo's recording studio or some kind of mysterious Scottish cult.

Of course, the intrigue wouldn't be there at all if it wasn't for the music the duo produces. Boards of Canada is known for their relatively unique production style amongst electronic music artists, foregoing synthetic sounds in favor of old-fashioned analog equipment. Taking in lots of field recordings, samples of 70's media, documentaries, and numbers stations, and running them all through heavy distortion and electronic manipulation, their sound is usually described as "warm" or "nostalgic." So while we wait for the release of Tomorrow's Harvest, I figure now is as good a time as any to run through some of the biggest landmarks of their discography.

I wrote this last winter for submission to several local area blogs and papers in Southcentral Alaska. Nobody wanted to take it, and it kinda settled to the depths of my hard drive. Looking back on it, my thoughts on this subject still haven't changed, and the topic of content monopolization is still relevant, even if it's old news for ADN specifically. So, here you go:

On December 4th, visitors to the Anchorage Daily News' website were given a rude awakening: Beginning on the 18th, readers would be expected to pay for subscription access to read online content, with ADN publisher Pat Doyle stating "We can no longer expect only advertisers and print subscribers to shoulder the complete burden of supporting news-gathering and distribution ... Having all our readers share that cost is an essential and important step toward preserving the foundations of a free and independent press for future generations of Alaskans."

Curiously enough, Doyle makes no mention to Alaskans that online paywalls are part of a nationwide initiative by McClatchy, their parent company, to introduce these paywalls to all their newspapers. Not only is failing to disclose this exceedingly misleading, but Doyle's claims are virtually meritless. McClatchy posted roughly $54.4 million in net income and a sheer $1.3 billion in revenue for 2011. Of that revenue, $956.3 million was attributed to advertising and $262.3 million to circulation. However, in a press release on their third quarter earnings, McClatchy president Pat Talamantes declared the paywalls "could add more than $20 million" in new revenue for 2013. $20 million compared to the $262.3 million they make in circulation screams either unenthusiasm or bad idea or both. It also trivializes the supposed necessity of the paywalls, considering the number of readers they're likely to upset with them, if not lose entirely.

Doyle tries to appeal to the audience with straw man arguments, saying "Our industry and our customers are realizing that the news and information we produce has real value, regardless of how our readers choose to access it." Clearly, the content they post has "value," otherwise they wouldn't be pulling so much revenue on advertising. McClatchy is already getting something for the value, so maybe this is really about something else.

When the Internet got popular, it did a wonderful thing: It made information free. No longer did newspapers and television stations hold a monopoly on the news. The Internet has not only made it easier for journalists to get news out faster, but gave it to readers for free, as they found new revenue streams through advertising that entirely negated the need to charge for content. Companies like Gawker and HuffPo who took advantage of this new environment have been thriving ever since, but McClatchy failed to adapt, applying the old-media model of attempting to hold information at a premium, bleeding out a further few drops of precious "value." The only problem is, as we enter 2013, this really pisses off consumers.

McClatchy is well aware of this with their unenthusiastic financial expectations, and charging more isn't going to improve the shoddy state of affairs at the Anchorage Daily News. What Doyle calls "the fairest, most accurate and most professional news report possible" will continue to be recycled AP wires and unedited press releases, and the fact McClatchy is going to be charging for it is an insult to journalism as a whole. Much like the little boy that throws a temper-tantrum when he can't stay up until 4 a.m. on a school night playing video games, online paywalls are a screaming and childish last-ditch attempt to keep the Old Ways relevant in the 21st century. But as Hunter S. Thompson put it in The Rum Diary, "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who see it coming and jump aside."

It's tax time. For the past few years, I've had a cardboard box filled with receipts and invoices and bank statements. It has had a place in my truck ever since I started the road trip, and I just finally got around to sorting out its contents, as it's time to file my taxes before my extension ends later this month.

It was accomplished, but it wasn't easy. Three years of receipts was three years of vivid memories, and for a sentimental sap such as myself, it was a pretty intense process. Half of the receipts weren't even actual business writeoffs - I just threw into the box whatever receipts I found floating around in my room or truck, figuring I'd sort them out later. Well, later was today. It's weird pulling little scraps of paper out of a box, and recalling the story attached to each one of them almost instantly.

There was a receipt from a Panera Bread in Atlanta, Georgia, dated October 29, 2011. That was the morning after the fantastic Rich Robinson concert I saw out there, when the starter motor in the truck died, and I temporarily gave up trying to get it working and slept in the truck overnight in the parking lot the truck died in. I woke up in the morning, freezing, and went inside with my laptop for a hot breakfast, complaining online to a couple friends of mine about my predicament. Later that afternoon I managed to get another customer to give me a hand in getting the truck started, which we succeeded in, and I drove all the way back to my grandparent's house in Augusta without turning the truck off, lest risking the starter failing on me again.

Autozone, Torrington, Connecticut, June 25, 2012. This was for a pair of replacement headlight bulbs for the F-250, after I had gotten drunk the night before and attempted to drive back to my dad's house at roughly three in the morning, succeeding in running down a string of mailboxes on the way. Sometimes little accidents like this happen.

A Circle K gas station in Orlando, Florida, October 4, 2011. An Arizona iced tea and an "Extra Strength" 5 Hour Energy. Two of my roommates and I were working on a job in Orlando that week, putting up a giant tent on the fairgrounds for some Pentecostal tent revival that was happening that weekend. This one was dated at 11:31pm, which means it was the day I decided to smoke a little bit as soon as work ended, then swung across town to get dinner at Chili's with my friend Katie, before going back to her place and spending several hours talking to her roommate while sobering up. I specifically remember being tired, grabbing the energy shot and tea, and spending the entire drive back home with the windows of the truck down, blaring Everclear as loud as I could and being absolutely filled with joy about life and the neverending Florida summer as the warm night air flowed into the cab.

Speaking of Katie, there was another receipt from another Circle K, this one in Wildwood, Florida on October 15, 2011. That was the night her and I (and my roommate Micah) drove up to Ocala to see our friend Saul, who was briefly in America to record an album with his band The Rose Line. The exhaust had blown out on Micah's car, and we stopped at this little gas station so I could crawl under and see what was wrong. After deducing that the car was safe to drive the rest of the way home, I had run inside with Katie to grab an energy drink and some snacks before making the trek back home.

One final one, for Home Depot in New Hartford, Connecticut, on November 16, 2010, for a bunch of lumber, bolts, braces and a couple locksets. That was when I decided to build a camper on the truck and take off on an adventure, and the next week was spent at my friend's house doing just that before I finally left New England for good. Ironically this receipt outlived the actual camper, as the camper was dismantled and disposed of once the truck reached Alaska last month.

Now all this nostalgia has been appropriately itemized, turning years of experience into numbers for a tax deadline. Something doesn't feel right here.

I've said it before, and I'll continue repeating it as necessary: Two years of bouncing around from city to city, with nothing more than a laptop and a beat-up pickup truck and no actual "home" other than the interstate highway system, was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. I have no regrets about it. I learned more about the world, and myself, in those two years than I did in my 22 years of existence prior to that. That aside, I still feel I fell short of a lot of things I initially wanted to do. I wanted to get a book done, but I'm still carrying around a rough draft that is only a quarter of the way there. I wanted to energize people across the country to start questioning their own lives like I did, and help them realize they could go on crazy adventures of their own. I wanted to establish a caravan of ragged cars and find other roving vagabonds to join me and tag along for the trip. Things didn't quite pan out that way as I got sucked into a personal existential crisis, battling my own demons as I tried to make sense of this surreal world I had stepped into. However, I did find somebody that not only went on his own trip, but was picking up the slack in the "getting others motivated" department. This guy is probably the most fitting subject for the first entry of what I'm dubbing "The Rad Americans Series," so lets talk about him.

I first stumbled across Steve Roggenbuck early last year, through a series of mutual friends in our Twitter circles. We never spoke, but I followed him regardless for whatever reason at the time. It didn't make sense to me at first; it just looked like some random poet and writer prone to lots of grammatical mistakes, and really popular in the "alt lit" circles that overlaid both of our separate online social scenes. I didn't get it at all, but I kept an eye on him regardless. Checked out some of the ebooks he was distributing too. Books like "Download Helvetica For Free," which was just a bunch of his chat logs set to the Helvetica font at enormous sizes. Odd concept and interesting idea, I thought. I still didn't see what the big deal was, but I kept tabs on his progress anyways.

Eventually came the day he announced something that really caught my attention: He was dropping everything to traverse the country. Sound familiar? It certainly did for me: An aspiring writer that wanted to get out and really experience the world, not caring about "jobs" or "school" or anything else the adults arbitrarily decreed as "responsible." Couchsurfing across the country and arranging meets with the characters he had met online. It was exactly where I had been, only he went in a slightly different direction. Whereas my journey had taken a more personal route, Steve was getting others motivated. I didn't realize what I had jumped into, and it took me two years to get my head on straight. Steve hit the ground running. He's hit up more cities now than I have, and is getting people out creating art and really showing them that there's more to this world than working, sleeping, and dying. Suddenly, Steve's character was making sense, and in a way I could relate to.

We've got similar ideas deep down, I feel, even if we diverge quite radically in the execution. Me: A proudly self-admitted alcoholic and drug abuser, a bitter cynic, and is prone to stringing together long paragraphs of obtuse word salad that abuse almost every rule in the English language. Him: A straight-edge kid, decidedly more upbeat, well versed in irony, and has absolutely atrocious grammar. He publishes his "art" and "poetry" in the form of tweets, blog posts and image macros. But you know something? The primary objective of language is not to glorify the language itself, but to communicate. And I find it absolutely fascinating that what it takes me a thousand words to say, he can say in just a single status update on Facebook. And how it's delivered matters not either, because as long as the recipient receives the message, he's succeeded in communication. He's conveying exactly what he wants to convey, established "rules" of writing be damned. After all, language is technically an invented construct anyways...

The "do unto others" mantra rings loud and clear through it all. I've been advocating that mantra for years, even though I've admittedly been far from living up to it, and been even further from articulating it properly. But Mr. Roggenbuck has managed to not only articulate it in a way people can understand, but to encourage others to also run with it. And those that hear it, those of this lost generation who have been inspired to get out and live, are also now helping others in the ultimate goal of just simply being happy.

Laws of grammar be damned. The arbitrary "responsibilities" laid out by the generations past be damned. Bullshit "educations" and "real jobs" and everything else the adults told us we had to do, all be damned.

What's the use of any of it if it doesn't lead to us being happy? What do you get in return for doing what you're told to be, instead of what you want to be?

I left home two years ago and found myself mired in a bizarre world of Americana and amateur journalism. No regrets about it, I had a great time, learned a lot, and it provided the inspiration I needed to start writing a book that one of these days I'll hopefully finish. But Steve left home and managed to help many of our peers in getting to see this world, and this life, in the same way we did. And that, is something I find far more admirable.

You can read more about Steve Roggenbuck at his website, LiveMyLief.com.

"Most people fail to realize how truly complex hot sauce can be. Much of what is on the market these days, at least on a large-scale, is just simply "hot." People only know about generic brands like Tabasco or Frank's, but a lot of independent operations and home bottlers are finding new ways to balance hot with taste. It's not just a matter of being hot anymore. Hot can simultaneously also be sweet or spicy or tangy or sour."