The digital life

I made what I thought was a very sensible decision, namely that I was not going to purchase an iPod -- one of those tiny, portable computer hard drives from Apple Computer designed to hold a ton of digitized music, a higher-tech Walkman -- until I actually had a ton of digitized music. They advertise that those little buggers can hold 10,000 songs at a time, which sounds like a promising prospect: "Carry your whole CD collection with you all the time!"

Their promise, however, depends on making one of your own. Before you can experience this marvel of the digital age, you have to digitize, or "rip", the music from your compact discs into a format the computer can understand. This takes a lot of time, particularly if, like me, your music collection contains many more than 10,000 songs. In fact, it's nearer to 10,000 CDs.

OK, well perhaps that's an exaggeration. But my motley assortment of cast recordings, jazz, folk, country-western, a cappella, pop, rock, dance, cabaret and classical discs does number in the thousands. It's a bit embarrassing, sometimes. At parties, when the conversation turns to matters of money and investing, at my turn I just smile enigmatically and aver that my funds are all tied up in CDs.

But over the past few months, by a piecemeal process, I've undertaken the task of stripping all the little 1s and 0s off the discs and storing them in my computer, their native habitat. It's slow going, taking between five and ten minutes to process each album.

And, occasionally, I get pangs of doubt. In geek speak, I'm converting the CDs into a computer file format called MP3 which, you may recall, was all the rage a few years ago among teens and college students swapping music with the Napster application.

I was a late-comer to that party; lacking, for the longest time, a high-speed phone connection attached to my home computer, the prospect of downloading large music files was too daunting. It never even occurred to me that I could simply convert the many music discs I already owned. So MP3 remained a mystery to me and I was, quite frankly, reluctant to explore and embrace it.

Hell, when they were introduced, I refused for a long time even to buy a CD player until I got a signed affidavit from somebody promising they wouldn't come out with something better a week or two after I did. The milk crates packed with vinyl and a closet full of eight-track cassettes, dying and dead formats, in my student apartment already cruelly mocked me and, at the same time, labelled me a luddite.

So naturally I'm fretting that as soon as I finished ripping all of my CDs into the MP3 format, they'll invent something better the next day and render all my time spent feeding disc after disc into the computer obsolete.

The process has, however, yielded a few discoveries about my music collection, some happy, some perplexing, some worrying. For example, I was only slightly surprised to discover that there are a few dozen discs I purchased but never bothered to remove the plastic wrapping from, meaning they've never been heard in my home. There are a carton or two more that I received either as demos from groups I sought to book for one performance series or another, or review copies passed on to me during my tenure as a music critic for a major daily newspaper. Still others are extra copies boosted from the radio station where I DJed after high school.

And there's nothing like touching every album in your collection to expose odd gaps and even odder surfeits in my inventory. Cast albums, naturally, comprise perhaps the largest percentage chunk of the lot, but I've got a suspiciously lesbian number of Joni Mitchell albums. A bit earlier alphabetically, my Bette Midler collection is complete, but there are several missing Madonnas. And how I ended up with three copies of the perternaturally awful concept album for Starlight Express, I have no idea. (I suspect I was too drunk at too many white elephant exchanges in the 80s.)

Anyway, I've a few more albums to convert (and by "a few", I mean "at least 1,500") before I order that iPod. It's nice to have a goal and, heaven knows, I've got plenty to listen to while I pass the time.

"Heaven Knows." Hmmm...

Donna Summer, Robert Plant, or The Corrs? They're all here somewhere.

Less a(ttra)ctive

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend of mine, a celebrated writer and fellatio novice who is, despite getting a late start on the hobby, quickly mastering the rudiments and, apparently, taking every opportunity to refine the craft.

Naturally, I applaud his industry and initiative. I think I may even have mentioned once or twice looking forward to contributing to his research into this most practical of arts.

Anyway, in the course of conversation, he raised the topic of the dreaded "gag reflex" and means by which to mitigate it. Without a second's hesitation, I reeled off two bits of advice. First, I said, like anything, practice is essential. With time and repetition, nearly anything becomes easier and more comfortably accomplished. This is as true of mansex as it is of multiplication tables.

Second, I quickly added, the gag reflex is "less active" in the morning, suggesting yet another in the long list of pleasures to be derived from wake-up sex.

Now, I think the speed with which my answer came may have given it some credence, some mantle of authority, like a long-established fact that lives on the forebrain and waits to be recited. The trouble is, I have no idea if it's true, physiologically speaking.

I know, you're not supposed to believe everything you read and certainly, that's seldom a problem for me, since I rarely even retain most of what I read. But the "fact" that the tendency to choke up a bit when things aren't proceeding down one's gullet as smoothly as they might be is less pronounced in the early hours of daylight? That's something I first read (or, as will quickly be made plain, misread) almost 20 years ago.

It was right there in black and white on the pages of The Joy of Gay Sex, the original 1977 edition, prized today not for its subject matter, much of which was either laughably obvious or dangerously incorrect, but for it's lavish and artistic -- no, really! -- illustrations. Subsequent editions of the volume, which is still in print, have retained too much of the outdated original text and all but eliminated the beautifully rendered pictures and diagrams. I don't recommend it as a primer.

I see that I made generous notes on my reading in my personal journal from the era and, despite having already more or less grasped and in some cases carried out the basics of the operation, I clearly learned a lot from the book.

It was the summer of 1985 and a few weeks before, I'd walked into the Waldenbooks of a suburban shopping mall and, before continuing on to the arcade where I'd spend the rest on futile round after round of Dragon's Lair, I marched up to the counter, bold as brass and plunked down a week's lawnmowing wages to buy it. I still shudder a little bit at the relative courage that required of me, and I still marvel that such a book was even stocked in the, I thought, unenlightened backwoods of northeast Missouri.

Anyway, that's what it said, along with a whole host of other things: "The gag reflex tends to be less active in the morning." I would have taken that knowledge and added it to the growing register of things I knew about who I was and what I very definitely wanted but for one small detail.

I've told you what it said. What I read, however, was: "The gag reflex tends to be less attractive in the morning."

I am chagrined to admit that, because a couple of years later I lent the book to a friend in Texas and it was never returned, it was almost 10 years before I ran across a copy of the book in a secondhand shop in Chicago, reread the passage in question and discovered my error. Yes, although it may tarnish my reputation as a cultural and sexual sophisticate, I spent my late teens and early 20s believing that kecking a bit while sucking cock was an unwelcome foible first thing in the A.M. but, just perhaps, considered excusable after sundown.

The thing is, now that I put it all down in words, I'm not entirely sure that both interpretations don't have some merit.