Famously (in my own mind) an art teacher once said: “Art is a dialogue. Without a reaction from a viewer, a painting does not communicate, and is not art.” Perhaps the point was taken to the logical extreme, but it hammers an important lesson home: the burden of the aesthetic experience isn’t all on the artist.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I purchased two used books recently, both Rolling Stone Record guides. One was published in 1980, and the other in 2000.

The 1980 volume was a bible of sorts for me when I was a teenager. I didn’t get an after-school job for the usual reason: to put gas in the tank of a crappy used car, so you can go do teenage stuff, although the money from it certainly was used for that. No, I was moved to find work for the express purpose of buying a stereo and building a record collection. Today you’d just go to Blogspot blogs or Youtube to build your free music library. Not in 1980. At that point in history, if you only cared about cruising, you bought cassettes. If you cruised AND had a classic car, there was a good chance you bought eight-tracks. But if you had arguments with your parents, got grounded and had to shut the world out with some critical musical listening on a big, heavy pair of headphones, vinyl was the only way to go. But the start-up cost, especially to a 15 year old, was not insignificant. It was a deal-breaker without that after-school job.

So I resigned myself to food service so I could buy own stereo and records- and not have to listen to the archaic junk in the living room. I wanted real high fidelity! I wanted to FEEL those guitars and drums and shrieks of life down to the very core of my soul. Thank goodness for layaway. Six months later, I bought my first amp. Six months after that, a decent turntable and set of headphones. And every paycheck went into the painfully slow procurement of one- sometimes two- $9 records at a time.

If you only have one new work of art, you study it. scrutinize it. Drop everything and give it your full, undivided attention. And if you are a teenager with an after-school job in the food service industry, you have to choose VERY carefully, because if you bought a shitty album, it HURT. I mean in a real, visceral, physical way. It was painful to hear your hard-earned $9 wasted on bad music. And in those days, it was hard to trade used stuff. It involved the postal system and a lot of trust. It sometimes didn’t turn out. People wonder why Columbia House was a viable business. This paragraph explains exactly why.

Anyway, they had a copy of the Rolling Stone Record Guide at the public library, on reference- meaning it could not be checked out. So before I had a car, I took a bus downtown after school every day and read it like seminary students read the Good Book- one chapter and verse at a time. I absorbed it so fully, that even today when I think of albums like ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres or James Gang’s Thirds, I can see their ratings in my mind’s eye (both got four out of five stars). It guided my purchases back then in the dark ages when you couldn’t hear the music before buying it.

So this book- the 1980 edition- is kinda the ur-document of my musical tastes. I went to college a few years later with my musical tastes forever changed by the intriguing artwork of the albums in the import bin- generally beyond the scope of Rolling Stone’s editorial tolerances, and we parted ways. Many years later I bought a used copy on a whim- a couple of dollars for a good copy, why not?- and while I was at it, bought a 20 year more recent update just for fun.

The 1980 editors knew the historic background of pop music, and could speak eloquently about where bands fit into that mosaic. They took the long view. If they didn’t outright reject the music, or praise it to high heaven, they could at the very least understand it. This meant even if the review was mediocre, you could glean from the review enough info to realize YOU would probably love it, and most of the time, they were right.

In stark contrast, the 2000 editors did not have much respect for the long view. They either ignore it or, worse, provided their own spontaneous assessment of it. Rather than trying to find some kind of real value of the music (an impossible task, but necessary to try, especially if you are going to rank things), they seemed to favor the sort of blanket dismissal that is dispensed all too common. I think they were trying to be irreverent and snarky, but the result just reads like narcissism. The criticism is not something you can depend on quite the stark contrast between editions. But it’s prescient nonetheless- it’s like a gaze into the crystal ball. It’s not too hard to find this kind of self-absorbed dismissal on the Interwebs.

Hardly any thought given to perspective. I can understand that to a degree- after all, what is music but sensory impulses to enjoy or not enjoy at the moment it’s played? But here’s the thing- without some patience and understanding, slow-growers never get a chance. Difficult work just remains difficult. It’s the aural equivalent to never eating your Brussels sprouts and going for the cupcake every time. Oh yes, the cupcake loves to please, and you can eat cupcakes all day long if you want. But it leaves you hungry. The more difficult Brussels sprouts give you longevity and a life of substance, not fluff, and in the end you’re more deeply satisfied.

Art is a two-way street. You can’t be content with mere ingratiation, unless you really, really don’t care about meaning and quality. But why would you be content with that? Would you be fine with friends that flatter you so you pay them attention, while secretly they loathe you? No, surely you would prefer real friends that weather the hard parts and appreciate you for who you are, not what they can get from you. Try the same with the art you enjoy. Look deeper. Find patterns. Look at the larger picture. Meet the artist halfway and try to understand why they don’t want to just spoon-feed you pleasure. It will be worth it.

I’m sure I’m not unique in using a couple of older laptops (a Macbook and a PC) for my various professional needs. Both run Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps with no problems; One is home to a modern Microsoft Office distribution for a couple different legacy jobs I need to perform occasionally and has a SQL Server/.NET development environment; the other is my Apache/PHP/MySQL environment. I have laptops because I grab work time when and where I can, and that is frequently on the road and with people around me. I create an invisible work perimeter around me in the form of a music library and headphones.

Yeah, I have given in to the temptations of iCloud, and do manage my purchases that way- it’s nice to have those available no matter what. But it’s only a small piece of my vast media empire. These machines have older drives, too; I’m waiting for the SSD price/capacity ratio to hit that magic decimal place. So in order to provide some multi to my media, I bring along an external drive. You know how it goes- now I have media in three different places: in the cloud and on two different portable drives.

Since I work in the development world, I tend to forget that I am sometimes The User, and need some professional guidance. I had this fab idea that I needed a NAS in my home network mix, so it can do most of the heavy lifting so my drives can retire and be primary and secondary backup sources. I impulsively grabbed a Seagate Control NAS while idly browsing at Best Buy the other day. Sure, I read the mixed reviews mentioning the slow transfer times. But no one was reporting you couldn’t stream stuff once it was set up. So I prepped myself to deal with days of slow copies from the external drives to the Seagate.

It was even more miserable than I anticipated. Directly connecting the external drives to the Seagate’s USB port proved to be the worst. I was seeing transfer rates of 1MB/s. At that rate, it was going to take a week. But it worse than that- the Seagate became completely unresponsive. Clearly neither Seagate nor Windows could handle a massive queue. Chunking it up was better- the OS and Seagate at least remained responsive- but the rate was no better, and I really didn’t want to copy 500GB 1 gig at a time. Interestingly I was getting 50 times the rate of transfer when copying over the wireless network- rates at about 50MB/s.

OS X, or rather *nix in general, provided a solution. The desktop support tech in me realized the best way to do it was to eliminate the U-factor entirely and let a program that specializes in large file transfers handle the packet negotiation. The usual OS “explore” method (whether *nix or Windows) just isn’t built for the task. It bombs out, becomes responsive, and doesn’t have a very automatic way of dealing with duplicates. The user is not always available to fix or retry. Robocopy, I would like to point out, is a strong contender for this. But only my Macbook reads both external drives, so I went for the built-in Rsync utility. It’s very easy to use; merely sync the Seagate with each drive, thus creating a single drive that has one copy of each media file from the two drives.

It is trivially easy to use the –ignore-existing switch to provide exactly that sort of situation. And in OS X, all you have to do is navigate to the source and destination folders, then drag them over the Terminal in order to add their paths to the command, which ended up looking something like this:

rsync –ignore-existing –recursive -verbose /Volumes/source/audio /Volumes/destination/audio

The -verbose switch is important for your peace of mind, as you can see RSync chunking through the files, calmly and consistently until the job is complete. Granted, at 50MB/s it took a couple of days to complete, but it did not die and it did not max out the CPU or RAM. It quietly sat in the background doing its thing in a Terminal window, and I was able to work on the machine without any grief. I I highly recommend this utility for moving large files across networks.

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