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lobsters-on-their-heads · 7 years

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Continuing Travels of Cophine, Chapt. 8

This one was more of a bitch than the past chapters have been, but I think it’s okay now. You can read the entire work here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/12116799?view_full_work=true

After shuttling through every major airport in Latin America (and several of the minor ones), Cosima expected landing in Toronto to be different, to feel like home.

It didn't.

As she leaned around Delphine to watch the city appear on the banks of Lake Ontario, she didn't get the thrill of seeing her home coming into view. It was just another city growing larger with their approach, not so different from San Juan, Buenos Aires, or São Paolo. Just colder and greyer.

“I've never seen it from this angle before,” she said.

“Hm?” Delphine opened one eye, frowning, both arms wrapped around her stomach.

“I've never flown into Canada before. I've driven or taken buses or whatever, but I've never seen it from the air.”

Delphine grunted. “`s nothing special.”

The plan landed in a few minutes, and they sat quietly waiting for first class to disembark before they stood up. When it was their turn, Cosima retrieved the carry-on suitcase containing the two remaining vials of clone cure from the overhead compartment, and led her still bleary-eyed fiancée from the plane. Parking themselves and their luggage in the non-citizens line for customs, Cosima wrapped her arms around Delphine's midsection and let Delphine rest her cheek on her the top of her head.

“Do you think you'll want to be a Canadian citizen one day? Like, after we're done traveling?”

Delphine shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Just maybe. Hmm. Usually I'm the one too tired to function after a flight, not you. You sure you're okay?”

Delphine nodded, though Cosima swore she felt a heaviness in Delphine's body that wasn't usually there.

“How much you wanna bet that you'll be wide awake once we put you in bed later?”

Delphine didn't answer.

The line moved foot by foot, a segmented snake of people moving through the legal limbo that existed on Canadian soil but not yet in Canada, and Delphine's eyes were closed more than they were open as she leaned either on Cosima's shoulder or on one of the lane dividers. The only time she perked up was when a security beagle went by sniffing everyone's luggage, and she pressed a knuckle against her lips to contain a squeal. Cosima mentally filed away the memory for later, when she might, potentially, be able to get Delphine a puppy. Some day. The thought was interrupted when Cosima's phone buzzed.

“Sarah says they're here,” she told Delphine.

“Hm,” was all Delphine said, still watching the beagle work its way down the line but no longer smiling. Cosima watched the way Delphine still rubbed her abdomen, and she wanted to do whatever she could to make the pain stop, to make Delphine smile again even for a second, but she knew that a customs line wasn't the place to try kissing it to make it better. She had to settle for kissing Delphine's cheek, instead.

“We'll be home soon,” she said.

For now, Cosima navigated their way through customs, paying the duty fee for the tequila they were bringing in, and leading her fiancée by the hand through the double doors into the arrivals area, where a small mass of people waited to greet their loved ones or business connections.

She saw the signs first – large poster board signs reading “WELCOME HOME” along with their names in rainbow colors and drawings of butterflies and airplanes, held by Charlotte and Kira. Charlotte stood as still and stoically as any of the sensible business people nearby, but Kira almost wiggled out of her skin. Both girls had grown since the summer, she saw, and Charlotte looked even more like the other sestras than she had on Skype. No matter how many times she saw her youngest clone, the resemblance to herself in adolescence still startled Cosima. Add a few years, a nose ring, and glasses, and Charlotte could start doing clone swaps. Behind the girls stood Sarah, looking almost the same as when Cosima last saw her, exhaustion, torn jeans, and all, and in her arms were two winter coats, one red, one black.

“You're gonna need these,” Sarah said after she'd hugged them both.

Cosima swathed herself in her old red coat, smelling the must of the Rabbit Hole's closet, and fought the memories that threatened to explode in her mind.

Meeting Alison for the first time. Running through campus with Delphine and a bottle of wine. Coughing up blood.

She shook her head and smiled to thank her sister. From her bag she took her hat and gloves, packed back in June with this day in mind, and Delphine did the same. Hers, though, were purchased in Mexico, where selection was limited. The hat was one of those ear-flap varieties decorated with bright red snow flakes and a white pompom on top that looked frikkin' adorable on Delphine, but which Cosima knew would be traded for Delphine's trusty old grey beanie in less than 24 hours.

Outside the airport, both of them gasped when the frigid air hit their faces, making Sarah and Kira laugh. Making sure the girls weren't quite in earshot, Cosima muttered, “fuuuuuck....”

“A bit different than what you've gotten used to, isn't it?” Sarah said.

Several rows of cars later, Sarah pulled out her keys and pushed a button to unlock a black Prius.

“What happened to Siobhan's truck?”

“Nothing. It's still back at the house. It's not that easy getting two girls to and from everywhere with it, though, you know? Especially since they keep getting taller on me.”

The Prius had four doors and a hatchback and looked more suited for Alison Hendrix than Sarah Manning, except for a bumper sticker advertising Bobby's Bar. Charlotte took the front seat, with Kira sitting between Cosima and Delphine in the back.

“Me and Charlotte convinced Mom to get this car,” Kira said. “And Colin helped, too.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said as she pulled out of their spot. “Alison wanted me to get a minivan.”

Cosima tried to imagine Sarah driving a minivan, and laughed. “Well, I appreciate any and all attempts at reducing the carbon footprint.”

Sarah pulled into the long line of cars exiting the airport parking lot. “That's what the girls said. What do you want for dinner, by the way? Or did you eat on the plane?”

Cosima smirked. “Yeah, no, we fly coach. No in-flight meals for us. And whatever you guys want is fine. How `bout you, babe?” She reached around Kira to tap Delphine's shoulder. “You want anything special for dinner?”

“Anything is fine. All I really want is a cup of coffee.”

Cosima snorted. “Only if you want to spend the night by yourself.”

In the time since leaving Dyad, Delphine's caffeine intake had been severely reduced, meaning each cup of coffee packed a much larger punch than it had in her days of four to six cups a day. She'd forgotten that once in Guatemala, when one of the clinic doctors gave her a 16 ounce cup of local brew in the afternoon and Cosima thought she might actually jitter out of her own skin. It was the only night Cosima had ever kicked Delphine out of bed, because Delphine simply could not keep her body still.

Charlotte twisted to look at them from the front seat. “Sarah says we're going wherever you guys want to go for dinner.”

“Yeah,” Kira agreed. “So you should pick something.”

They looked at each other over Kira's head, and Delphine shrugged. “You have been saying you miss maple syrup. And peanut butter.”

At that, both Charlotte and Kira broke into smiles. “We can go to Jack's!” Kira cried. “We can have breakfast for dinner!”

Sarah paid for their parking and the car sped out onto the highway towards Toronto proper. Cosima was struck by how different the landscape here was from each Latin American city they'd been to, and she was about to comment on it, but when she looked over, she saw a far off look on Delphine's face. Her fiancée's mouth was drawn into a small frown, and her eyes were larger than usual. Cosima reached over and brushed the side of her head, making Delphine jump a little.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yes.” Delphine turned to kiss Cosima's wrist. “Just remembering things.”

At Jack's Diner, they all piled into a booth towards the back, and everyone got hot chocolate except Sarah, who got black tea. Cosima hadn't thought she was hungry on the ride over, but the pies in the front display case called her name as she walked past, and just about everything on the menu looked amazing.

“Will you judge me,” Cosima asked the table at large, “if I order something super unhealthy?”

“It's the Christmas season,” Delphine said, “so we can all be a little unhealthy, I think.”

“Alison would disagree with you there,” Sarah said. “Apparently she's got her whole family on a diet right now.”

Kira giggled. “That's just because she caught Helena giving the twins butter.”

“What's wrong with butter?” Delphine asked. “They're eating solids now, aren't they?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said, “but it's just butter. Like, she gets a glob of butter on her fingers and gives it to them like that. They love it.”

Cosima could picture that quite well, and she imagined that Helena would transfer some of her own idiosyncrasies about food to her feeding of the boys, who were now nine months old. “That sounds like Helena,” she said.

Delphine nodded. “As long as they're getting a balanced diet otherwise and their pediatrician says they're okay, butter should be fine.”

“She also gave them a can of frosting,” Charlotte said, “but I think she ate most of that herself.”

It must've been news to Kira, who turned to her mother to indignantly say, “you never let me eat frosting out of the can!”

“Yeah, `cause I'm not Helena, and neither are you! You heard about her trip to the dentist, yeah, Cos?”

She had. Apparently Helena had gone most, or even all, of her life without seeing a dentist, and that combined with her sugar addiction had created a goldmine of cavities. The only way the family had gotten her through the initial exam and cleaning was by Donnie holding her hand the whole time, and discussions were underway as to how to get her through the recommended fillings and a potential root canal.

“She just needs a little moral support,” Kira had said. “She's afraid of doctors.”

“I'm sure one of us can sit with her through it,” Cosima said. “If that's what it takes. We'll find a dentist who understands.”

The waiter came for their orders, and Delphine got a salad. All the talk of butter and frosting turned her off of the heavier menu items, but Cosima had the opposite response, ordering a plate of French toast, scrambled eggs with cheese, and hash browns. She might regret it all later, but that was a problem for later. Sarah ordered a club sandwich, Kira got a stack of pancakes, and Charlotte ordered the eggs benedict.

While they waited for their food to arrive, they chatted about family news and local happenings, with Kira doing most of the talking and Sarah or Charlotte chiming in with side notes or corrections. They learned that Cal Morrison, Kira's father, might be coming to town for Christmas, but no one was quite sure how likely that was. Then their food arrived, and Cosima stopped caring about Cal Morrison. After a few minutes of quiet chewing and the clatter of silverware on plates, Charlotte sighed and slumped in her seat.

“What's wrong?” Cosima asked. The youngest Leda had seemed in better spirits that evening than in their recent Skype calls, but she could be moody, too.

Charlotte twisted her mouth like she didn't want to say, but then said, “Ira's was better.”

Ira's. Cosima had not thought about Ira for months, focusing on the Ledas they could and would save rather than the Castor men they hadn't even tried to save. She reached across the table and took Charlotte's hand in hers. “Ira was a good guy,” she said. “I know you miss him.”

Tears gathered in Charlotte's eyes, but she nodded and picked her fork back up. She didn't eat, but pushed a piece of egg around on her plate, eyes down.

“Did he ever show you how to make it?” Delphine asked.

Charlotte shook her head. “He said it was hard to get it right.”

Delphine nodded. “It is hard, but once you have the technique, it's not too bad. Would you like to learn?”

“Do you know how to make it?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes, but it's been a while.”

Cosima leaned back from her own decimated plate to arch an eyebrow at Delphine. “You've never made me an eggs benedict.”

“You've never asked for one.”

After they'd eaten their fill of diner food and Cosima decided against buying any pies, Sarah drove them to the Rabbit Hole and dropped them off. “See you tomorrow, yeah?” she called from the driver's seat.

Cosima nodded. “Yeah, definitely. Maybe tomorrow afternoon, though. We need to settle in a little before too much family time.”

Downstairs, in the cold former storage space come laboratory, she and Delphine turned on all the lights, set down their luggage, and stood for a minute, staring at the space and each other. It was cold enough that their breath fogged in the air. Despite the months that she and Delphine had spent living here after the fall of Neolution, the first memories that sprang to Cosima's mind were of bloody coughing fits, robot worms, and soul crushing despair, but to her surprise, she still felt a rush of fondness for the little apartment – laboratory combo.

“You know,” Cosima said, “I didn't realize it, but I kind of missed this place. In a weird way.”

Delphine turned on the nearest space heater, then wrapped her arms around Cosima and nuzzled her hair. “Why is it weird?”

“Because so much of the time I spent here was.... well, it wasn't exactly happy.”

“No. But some of it was, I think.”

She nodded and rubbed her nose against Delphine's warm neck. “Yeah. Especially once you got here.”

Delphine giggled. Her clothes smelled like coffee and bacon, and the stale airplane air they had marinated in for much of the day. Then she sighed and pulled Cosima closer.

Cosima rested her her hands on Delphine's hips and thought back to their dinner. “Is it okay with you that I've only told Sarah so far?”

“What?”

“That we're engaged. Sarah's the only one I've told, well, not counting Art. The girls don't know.”

“Oh, no, that's okay. If you told the girls, they would run around and tell everyone else before we got the chance to, and you want to tell them yourself.”

“Exactly.”

They broke away from each other to turn on the remaining space heaters scattered around the basement and to check their stores of winter clothing. Then, Cosima went over to the storage case and looked at the new vials of the clone vaccine Scott had put together for them. “We'll need some more. There's only twenty here, and we have, what, fifty in Europe and the Middle East?”

“Something like that.” Delphine plucked at the sleeve of Cosima's jacket. “Worry about that tomorrow. I'm going to take a shower, and you know the hot water here doesn't last very long.”

By the time Cosima got into the tiny bathroom with the clawfoot bathtub and the fitful shower head, Delphine was already naked and shampooing her hair. No matter how many times Cosima had seen Delphine naked, in various states, moods, and positions, watching Delphine wash her hair always held a special appeal for her. Maybe it was the way Delphine's arms raised above her head and stretched out her torso, or the way she held her head to one side, or maybe it was just the play of water over her skin, coursing across the freckles on her back and down the crack of her ass...

“Are you coming in?”

“Yeah, yeah. Totally.” She shucked off her clothing and climbed in with her, hurrying to soap up the most important parts of herself. As Delphine predicted, the water cooled off just as they finished rinsing off, so Cosima had goose bumps when she stepped out. There would be no shower sex in this place, that was for sure.

After they'd showered, dried off, and crawled under the layers of blankets on the bed, Cosima tucked herself against Delphine's body and breathed in the warm smell of her skin and hair. Delphine wore a T-shirt and flannel pajamas pants, and Cosima missed the easy access to her bare skin she'd had in Latin America, when all Delphine wore to bed most nights was a pair of shorts. She kissed her above the neckline of the T-shirt.

“I'm glad you're here,” she whispered.

Delphine squeezed her arm. “Me too. Did you think I wouldn't be?”

“No, no. It's not that. I'm just glad you're here.”

“Hm.”

She felt Delphine smile, and her fingers tapped against Cosima's arm even as residual warmth from the shower weighted Cosima's limbs down. “You're not even, like, remotely tired anymore, are you?” Cosima asked.

“Only a little bit. I slept pretty heavily on the plane.”

Cosima remembered Delphine's face, tucked into and drooling on her rolled up sweatshirt, scowling in her sleep. “You did. You seemed upset when you woke up, too. Did you have a bad dream?”

Delphine paused before answering, which meant the answer was probably yes even if Delphine said no. She pulled Cosima closer and ran her fingers over her upper arm, feeling the curves of her muscles. They'd both kept fit on their journey, walking and biking a lot, doing yoga, and discovering a mutual love of rock climbing, complete with jokes about the next time they'd get each other in a harness.

“You could say that,” she said.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

Delphine chest shook a little as she breathed in, making Cosima look up to see her staring at the ceiling. Cosima knew when Delphine was stalling. A year after their little Don't Ask Don't Tell arrangement on Revival, Delphine talked a lot more, but her habit was still to keep difficult topics close to her chest, even as Cosima got better about seeing through her defenses.

“I don't remember all of it,” she said.

Cosima rubbed her thumb over Delphine's ribs through her shirt. “That's okay. Tell me what you remember.”

“It was just... old worries I thought I was finished with. Like, something scraped up the old, accumulated gunk from the underside of my psyche and set it floating around in my head again. I need to just let it settle back into place, forget about it again.”

“That's an oddly poetic way to describe it without telling me what you actually dreamed about.”

She let out a huff of air. “Okay. I dreamed that you were dead. Is that better?”

Cosima kissed her jaw, then her cheek. “I'm sorry.”

“For what?”

“For your dream, for almost dying on you a couple times before, for being a brat. You know. For all of it. All the clone drama you've had to put up with over the years. And that you'll probably have to keep putting up with.”

Delphine kissed her back, holding her lips in hers for a moment before letting go. “You're worth it. And besides, I don't expect any upcoming clone drama to even remotely rival the drama with Neolution. Do you?”

“Oh, God, let's hope not.”

“We're safe now. I mean, as safe as anyone really is.”

She kissed the corner of Delphine's mouth, then the side of her nose and her temple. “I still think about it though, in like, fits and spurts. Sometimes I go days without even thinking or remembering that, hey, we didn't always have it this nice, you know. And then it hits me, like, I'll have a bad dream, or some smell will hit me, or I'll see someone who looks like Coady or Susan Duncan or whoever, and it all comes rushing back. Is it like that with you, too?”

Delphine gave her a small smile and stroked her face. “Yes. It is exactly like that.”

Cosima wanted to say more, but a large yawn stifled her words, and she snuggled back against Delphine. When she spoke again, her voice slurred a little with sleepiness. “It's probably just being back here. Back in Toronto, back in this basement. Seeing Sarah again, all that. It's kind of hit me, too. There's a lot of memories here.”

“Yes, there are. But, we can make new ones. New memories.”

“Damn skippy we will.”

Delphine giggled and tugged the blankets higher to cover their shoulders. Cosima's body relaxed, but her mind kept going, catching on the rough edges of memories. “Are you okay?” Delphine asked.

“Yeah, I'm good. Just, you know. You got me thinking, too. About the power of memories, and how our brains just, like, snap us back in time without much warning.”

“Mmm. Yes, they do.”

“Like, there was that one clinic we were in, I think it was in Sucre, and they'd just had a patient come in bleeding all over the damn place, and the walls were just concrete, and it was damp, and something about the smell just...”

She closed her eyes, but it wasn't the clinic she saw behind her eyelids.

“Like, I didn't even register the smell first,” Cosima went on. “The memory hit me before the smell really clicked. I didn't have any choice about whether or not to remember.”

Delphine stroked her hair. “Which memory?”

“The cage, and Janus. All that.”

Delphine hadn't learned about those details until after Westmoreland was dead, after the dust had settled on Neolution and various law enforcement agencies had tied up the loose ends. Delphine had stumbled across the partial tuxedo tucked in the back of the closet and asked Cosima if she would ever wear it again, and Cosima had told her the story. Cosima remembered how pale Delphine's face had gone, and how tightly she'd held her in her arms afterwards.

Delphine rubbed her back under the covers and nuzzled her hair. “You can talk about it more, if you want to.”

“I know. As I recall, though, we started talking about your inner demons, not mine.”

“I'll tell you more about mine in the morning.”

“Hmm. You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Do you promise to still be here in the morning when I wake up?”

She kissed Cosima's fingers. “Yes, I promise. There's nowhere else I want to be.”

#continuing travels of cophine #cophine fanfiction #orphan black fanfiction #cosima x delphine #I've just really been craving diner food for like a month

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angel-marvill-blog · 7 years

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Usa vs russia

Who Would Get Between Russia And US In A World War? Specialists Review Weapons And

ACA's log, Hands Control Today, continues to be the greatest in the marketplace. India, Israel, and Pakistan under no circumstances authorized the NPT and possess nuclear arsenals. Iraq initiated a secret nuclear program under Saddam Hussein before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. North Korea announced its withdrawal from the NPT in January 2003 and has tested nuclear devices since that time. Iran and Libya have pursued secret nuclear activities in violation of the treaty's terms, and Syria is suspected of having done the same. Still, nuclear nonproliferation successes outnumber failures and serious forecasts years back that the globe would become house to a lot of areas equipped with nuclear weapons possess not come to pass.

The Russians recently announced plans for a naval exercise in the eastern Mediterranean this fall, but did not identify precisely when ships would deploy to the area. The workout will feature the Dark Sea Fleet's flagship, the guided missile cruiser Moskva, mainly because well as several smaller companion ships and large amphibious attack and landing ships, Russia's TASS news agency reported. Some armed service officials query whether the exercise is a cover for shipping more troops and gear to the Syrian usa vs russia.

The nuclear-weapon areas (NWS) are the five states-China, Italy, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States-officially recognized as possessing nuclear weapons by the NPT. The treaty legitimizes these states' nuclear arsenals, but establishes they are not supposed to build and maintain such weapons in perpetuity. In 2000, the NWS committed themselves to an unequivocal undertaking…to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” Because of the secretive nature with which most governments treat information about their nuclear arsenals, the majority of the statistics below are greatest quotes of each nuclear-weapon state's nuclear holdings, including both proper warheads and lower-yield gadgets known to as tactical weapons.

Both sides have even more than enough to totally destroy each other several times. According to the Arms Control Association, Russia has 1,735 strategic warheads deployed on 521 ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers, and 2,700 non-deployed strategic and deployed and non-deployed tactical warheads, and 3,200 additional warheads are awaiting dismantlement.

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Brazil occupied Paraguay and Uruguay and overcome them, adding their area to Brazil. The overall economy of Sth American countries started gradually but definitely enhancing thanks a lot to carefully knit alliances and relationships. Rabelo recommended that the communist governments of Sth U . s form one large union called the Brazilian Union of Communist States (BCS), an idea that caught on fairly quickly with the union being established on May 14, 2017. The BCS would end up being reigned over by the President, Josè Rabelo, but each specific country would end up being ruled by its particular leader, selected by Rabelo. The BCS occupied Bolivia on July 3rdeb and it was added to the BCS a short time after, placing the majority of South America under BCS rule. In December of this 12 months, the BCS would purchase South Georgia and the South Meal Islands for $6.7 billion.

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First, in 1995, during President Costs Clinton's go to to Moscow, Russia pledged to full forward of plan all previously agreed upon agreements with Iran on deliveries of armed forces items and not to determine any brand-new armed forces contracts with Tehran. The formal putting your signature on of these contracts was the Gore-Chernomyrdin Memorandum of August 30, 1995, and Russia's general cutbacks credited to this move had been approximated by professionals at $4bd. Nevertheless, this do not really result in a success in relations with Washington and by 2000, Moscow experienced restarted armed service co-operation with Iran.

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mediaadvertising-stuff-blog · 6 years

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mediatrucksinc · 1 month

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nextstepelectric · 4 years

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html

For those of us that are of the age to have experienced the 'Golden Age' of vinyl records, 'Rock N Roll' and coming of age during 'Woodstock' this is a must read article. It will bring back wonderful memories!!!

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"In that moment, talking about our sons, I realized how all of Young’s obsessions fit together: They are centered in a common understanding of experience and how it shapes us. Human development is led by our senses. Our senses exert a formative and shaping pressure on our brains. So if our experience of the world around us can damage our brains and our souls, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that music can also help us feel better. Every musician, and every music fan, believes that."

Neil Young’s Lonely Quest to Save Music

He says low-quality streaming is hurting our songs and our brains. Is he right?

By David Samuel's | Published August 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 20, 2019 1:31 PM ET |

Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees. He hates Spotify. He hates Facebook. He hates Apple. He hates Steve Jobs. He hates what digital technology is doing to music. “I’m only one person standing there going, ‘Hey, this is [expletive] up!’ ” he shouted, ranting away on the porch of his longtime manager Elliot Roberts’s house overlooking Malibu Canyon in the sunblasted desert north of Los Angeles. The dial thermometer at the far end of the porch indicated that it was now upward of 110 degrees of some kind of heat. Maybe the dial was stuck.

When you hear real music, you get lost in it, he added, “because it sounds like God.” Spotify doesn’t sound like God. No one thinks that. It sounds like a rotating electric fan that someone bought at a hardware store.

No one in their right mind would choose to live in the canyons outside Los Angeles, especially in the summertime between noon and 5. There isn’t enough water or shade. After a few months of summer heat, the scrub on the mountainsides is baked dry. Then someone gets sloppy with a stray cigarette butt or a campfire or the power company fails to maintain a power line and a spark accelerates into a terrifying wildfire that sends up pillars of thick smoke that from a distance hovers over the canyons like an illustration from an old Bible. News crews record burning mansions, which are intercut with the winsome llamas of the rich and famous that have been safely removed to Zuma Beach. Stragglers are incinerated in their cars.

The view was incredible, though. Young has been living up here on and off for decades. At one point, he owned more than 1,000 acres of much-coveted Malibu real estate, where movie producers and actors and billionaire tech tycoons build mansions with supersize swimming pools, grotesque advertisements of corruption and hubris, which are some of the major sins that Young rails against.

I enjoyed listening to Young rant on about the modern condition. We were vibing. He is passionately opposed to global warming, genetically modified seeds, corporate greed-heads who are despoiling Mother Nature and an assortment of other sinners who interfere with our God-given right to happiness. His ire this afternoon, directed through me and my notebook and my Sony digital recorder, was focused on the engineers of Silicon Valley, against whom he has been zealously waging war for decades. Silicon Valley’s emphasis on compression and speed, he believes, comes at the expense of the notes as they were actually played and is doing something bad to music, which is supposed to make us feel good. It is doing something bad to our brains.

The same goes for everything else that Silicon Valley produces, of course: the culture of digital everything, which is basically a load of toxic, mind-destroying crap. It’s anti-human.

“I’m not putting down Mark Zuckerberg,” he continued, his voice taking a turn. “He knows where he [expletive] up. Just the look on his face,” he said, wagging his finger toward a television screen inside Roberts’s living room, where the Facebook chief executive was giving sworn testimony before a panel of lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. “You know, he came to me in a dream the other night, and I felt really sorry for him,” he said. “He was just sitting there sweating and kind of didn’t know how to talk, because he [expletive] up so badly.” There he was, Zuckerberg, on the large-screen TV, sweating bullets.

Young was no longer the righteous wandering hippie avatar of his early album covers. He’s an old man now at 73. He’s fleshy and jowly and red-faced, with long, stringy hair. He looked like a prosperous prairie farmer (hogs or cows, some form of livestock) minus the overalls. You can imagine Farmer Neil attending church every Sunday and preaching manic sermons from the pews. What’s still the same are his eyes, smoldering like two hot coals stuck beneath his overhanging brow that featured so prominently on the cover of “After the Gold Rush,” his third album, released in September 1970, back when young people, stoned on primitive weed, might plausibly spend an entire weekend listening to his visions of a lone wanderer adrift in a lost Eden.

As we went back and forth about the dynamics of digital sound-compression and the general evil of big tech, Young got mad about his Facebook user agreement, which not even his high-priced lawyers can untangle. “I’m pissed off about my user agreement,” he says. “I’m pissed off about my privacy policy.”

Yet I could tell that this wasn’t what he wanted to be talking about. Young doesn’t want to be a downer. He is passionate about music. The point of music, and of Young, is to make people feel less lonely. I had taken him to a dark place that he didn’t want to go.

“I really wish this interview hadn’t happened,” he later said, seeming more downhearted than angry.

“I feel horrible,” I answered, and I did. I was hoping to soothe the old rock star, who spoke to me through the headphones of my Sony Walkman at the moments I felt most isolated and alone. The last thing I wanted to do was make him feel bad. It felt awful. What I wanted was to hear him play music and to write more songs. “I mean, the worst thing I could have done is to make you feel defeated,” I told him, “and now that’s what I’ve done.”

Neil Young has always been a little too hot to handle, so passionate and smart and always a little bit off his rocker, which might be part of the glory and also the downside of being Neil Young. Yet what weirds me out most about his emotional weather patterns, which are superfamiliar to me from my teenage Walkman years, is the new sense that each of his individual miniflights and tantrums was being processed by a tiny hyperaware control freak who lives inside Young’s personal control tower. The little man charts every little fragment of new meaning or awareness and what its trajectory might potentially signify on a giant whiteboard. Young hears you listening, and he is hip to that angle, and he incorporates that in his next riff. Polite conversation under such conditions can be a baffling and frustrating type of experience. After an hour, we agreed to turn the tape recorder off, and Roberts orders pizza. But the little man in the control tower was still up there, watching.

My diagnosis, after a lifetime of listening and an afternoon on Roberts’s porch and a couple of longer off-the-record interviews about his life and work, is this: Neil Young is trapped in a cycle of second- and third- and fourth-guessing, which is an affliction that is not unique to his brain. To escape from this cycle, he is continually forcing himself back into the moment and then trying to capture that feeling and energy, which is a specific kind of artistic choice. That larger cycle, combined with his magnificent control over his art, is what makes him such a uniquely vital and generative artist, at an age when peers like Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger have become skeletal holograms of their former selves. When he looks back, which is something he did often during our conversations, it is toward the specificity of what some younger version of Neil Young did in a particular moment when he really nailed it. The latest live album he released was recorded at a gig in 1973, in Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama; it is part of an archival series, and they are all miracles. As Young once put it, “I’d rather play in a garage, in a truck or a rehearsal hall, a club or a basement.” What he is after is not some ideal sound but the sound of what happened. The missed notes and off-kilter sounds are part of his art, which is the promise of the real, but also, even mainly, of imperfection.

The idea that big technology companies are engineering all that back-and-forth out of his music just kills him. It’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t want to write music anymore, he admitted. I tried once again to console him.

“The songs always came to you in bunches,” I said. It’s an encouraging thought. But Young was only willing to meet my optimism halfway.

“I’ve got great melodies, and the words are all profanities,” he answered. “I was just telling Elliot the other day, I’m not interested in making any more records,” he insisted, plunging us down once more into the void. “They sound like [expletive].”

Young’s belief in the saving power of music couldn’t be any more personal. In 1951, at age 5 in Ontario, he got sick with a fever, which turned out to be polio. His father, the hockey writer Scott Young, chronicled the Toronto Maple Leafs and wrote young-adult novels about stouthearted boys on ice that were a staple of Canadian boyhood. Neil was not meant for hockey. His mother, Rassy, was a sharp-witted panelist on the popular weekly Winnipeg television show “Twenty Questions”; she was always intensely protective of her son. When I asked him about what it felt like to be a sick child and to grow up lonely, he said: “I loved playing music, and I wasn’t that alone. You know that’s what I wanted to do, that’s what I wanted to do with my life, and that’s all I paid attention to.”

Maybe Young could have become a big rock star without that childhood illness, without being so complicated. His peers talent-wise, at 19, included genius musicians like Stephen Stills, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix, the last of whom was the greatest American popular musical talent maybe ever. What set Young apart from that company was his sustained refusal to bend to anyone else’s idea of what audiences wanted to hear. His signature move was to accomplish something amazing and then blow it up, in the pursuit of something that would sound even more real.

“Neil Young,” his first solo album, recorded in 1968, at 22, after his departure from the supergroup Buffalo Springfield, showed off ageless melodies combined with clever, wised-up lyrics (“I used to be a folk singer/keeping managers alive”). The album failed to sell. The sound was too pretty and too clever at the same time. His second studio album — and first with his longtime band Crazy Horse — “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” is my personal favorite Neil Young record, and was also Elliot Roberts’s favorite (he died two months ago). It introduced what became Neil’s defining edge, i.e., the sound of his ruminations, distortions and mistakes. The album made it to No. 34 on the American charts, and included the hit “Cinnamon Girl.” He wrote much of the album while running a fever of 103.

Young joined with Stills, David Crosby and Graham Nash (my personal ordering of talents) in the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with Young positioned as the defiant outsider against the gorgeous harmonies of the latter three. CSNY turned Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” (she watched the festival on TV) into a generational anthem, and then imploded. (Side note: The year after Neil Young got sick as a child, Mitchell — then a young girl living in Fort Macleod, Alberta — contracted polio during the same outbreak of that disease. She also found herself in writing songs. Maybe something about that childhood illness, which left both children weakened for several years, altered the way that Young and Mitchell processed the evidence of their senses. The dreamy harmonics both favored, and the way that the music and the words shade into each other, suggests both the wooziness and the emerging clarity that a child coming out of a fever might experience.)

Young’s fourth solo album, “Harvest,” distilled his songwriting gifts, which had been given broad exposure through the supernovalike appearance and implosion of CSNY, into a collection of Southern California-inflected hits like “Heart of Gold,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “Old Man” and “Words (Between the Lines of Age)”; it became the best-selling American album of 1972, despite critics labeling the raw vulnerability of the songs as off-putting, self-pitying or as one critic put it “embarrassing.” The AM radio success of “Harvest” cleared a path toward the stratospheric levels of commercial songwriting success and luxury-hotel-suite destruction enjoyed by the Eagles, a supergroup of superbrilliant songwriters who, unlike Young, preferred highway driving.

In response to the success of “Harvest,” Young switched up his style again, obliterating his hit radio melodies with epileptic seizures of dissonance and feedback. (Young himself suffered from epilepsy, to the point that he would have seizures and sometimes black out.) “Heart of Gold,” as he explained it in his liner notes, “put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”

For the time being, there would be no more pretty melodies and note-perfect guitar playing. Instead, Young’s music centered on a distinctive alternation of melodic beauty, earsplitting feedback and passages where he seemed to be playing his guitar with his fist. On a third or fourth listen, these passages often revealed themselves to be part of larger, deliberate, gorgeous patterns that bent the listener’s ear in the directions that he wanted it to go. You had to listen to the whole albums all the way through to really hear the songs. Young’s own guitar playing sounded too deliberate to express the fullness of his own sound, so he often featured the rhythm guitar playing of Frank Sampedro, who played loud rock ’n’ roll in his garage, which was the sound that Young was after in perfecting imperfection.

Within his own specific lineage of deeply melodic rock-guitar playing, incorporating infinite branching possibilities and a taste for soulful, aggressive dissonance, Young is great to listen to. But a better pure player than Young would be a guy like, say, John Frusciante, the former guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who is wildly talented. Give both men 30 seconds to solo, and Frusciante would blow Young off the stage, just as Duane Allman would blow Frusciante off the stage. Young is something else, though. He’s a genius, a word that can be usefully defined as the ability to create and realize an original style that, in turn, can for decades generate its own genres of music containing the DNA of deeply original songs by other extremely talented, original songwriters and musicians, all of whom owe something to him. His music helped shape the melodic-depressive post-Beatles catalog of Pacific Northwest angst, which was brought to its songwriting peak by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Elliott Smith, the Irving Berlin and Cole Porter of suicidal ideation and addiction. Cobain committed suicide on April 5, 1994. Smith, who was an even more intimate songwriter, in the same catchy, brilliant, self-pitying vein, stabbed himself through the heart and bled to death on Oct. 21, 2003, in an apartment in Los Angeles. While the circumstances of both deaths are disputed by conspiracy theorists, Neil Young is indisputably still here.

But he is stumped. Let’s take a moment to look at the future of recorded sound, the topic that has got him so overheated. The invention of the phonograph in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison, a k a the Wizard of Menlo Park, and one of the great visionaries in American history, marked the culmination of several decades of attempts to capture the magic of sound in physical, reproducible form. Early sound recorders used a large cone to capture the air pressure produced by sonic waves created by a human voice or an instrument. The cone directed sound waves against a diaphragm attached to a stylus, which thereby inscribed an analog of those waves onto a roll of paper or a wax-coated cylinder. The use of electrical microphones and amplifiers by the 1920s made it possible to record a far greater range of sound with far greater fidelity.

Magnetic tape, which was pioneered in Germany during the 1930s, propelled another giant leap forward in fidelity, while also beginning the process of freeing sound from the physical mediums on which it was recorded. Tape could be snipped and edited and combined in ways that allowed artists, producers and engineers to create symphonies in their own minds and then assemble them out of multiple takes performed in different places and at different times. The introduction of high-end consumer digital-sound-recording systems by companies including Sony and 3M further loosened music’s connection to a physical medium, thereby rendering sound infinitely plastic and, in theory, infinitely reproducible. Then came the internet, which delivered on the mind-boggling promise of infinitely reproducible sound at a cost approaching zero.

At ground level, which is to say not the level where technologists live but the level where artists write and record songs for people who care about the human experience of listening to music, the internet was as if a meteor had wiped out the existing planet of sound. The compressed, hollow sound of free streaming music was a big step down from the CD. “Huge step down from vinyl,” Young said. Each step eliminated levels of sonic detail and shading by squeezing down the amount of information contained in the package in which music was delivered. Or, as Young told me, you are left with “5 percent of the original music for your listening enjoyment.”

Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners’ brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn’t there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured.

If you want to envision how Young feels about the possibility of having to listen to not only his music but also American jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular song via our dominant streaming formats, imagine walking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Musée d’Orsay one morning and finding that all of the great canvases in those museums were gone and the only way to experience the work of Gustave Courbet or Vincent van Gogh was to click on pixelated thumbnails.

But Young hears something creepier and more insidious in the new music too. We are poisoning ourselves with degraded sound, he believes, the same way that Monsanto is poisoning our food with genetically engineered seeds. The development of our brains is led by our senses; take away too many of the necessary cues, and we are trapped inside a room with no doors or windows. Substituting smoothed-out algorithms for the contingent complexity of biological existence is bad for us, Young thinks. He doesn’t care much about being called a crank. “It’s an insult to the human mind and the human soul,” he once told Greg Kot of The Chicago Tribune. Or as Young put it to me, “I’m not content to be content.”

I was surprised to find myself talking with Young at all. He only really agrees to speak with the press, or to the press, to publicize something new and weird, like his 3,000 square feet of miniature Lionel train track that he housed in his barn or the experimental film he recently made with his wife, Daryl Hannah. For years, Young also put on a benefit concert for the Bridge School, which educates children who have cognitive and sensory disorders. Young’s sons, Zeke and Ben, both have cerebral palsy.

That’s another thing about Young that rescues him from nihilism and self-pity: He does stuff, even if what he does sometimes seems loony. He made a documentary and a YouTube channel about converting his 1959 Lincoln Continental to operate on alternative fuels, and he has been known to distribute unlicensed non-G.M.O. seeds at his shows, from which his fans can grow their own, uncontaminated grains. A few years ago, he appeared on David Letterman’s show to introduce his PonoPlayer, which was his first attempt to right the wrongs that streaming music is doing to our brains. “It means righteous in Hawaiian,” he told Letterman, who seemed both impressed by the device and thoroughly perplexed by the need for it. “Is this a digital way of recording analogous sound?” Letterman asked. “I’m struggling here to find something I can understand.”

His next remedy, which is why he invited me out to Roberts’s home, is a website that he calls the Neil Young Archives: a digital repository of his recorded work that he introduced last summer at considerable personal expense. (“Let’s say, ‘Well over a million dollars,’ ” Roberts suggested to me later, with a sigh.) The interface for the Archive looks like a set of old file cabinets that might have been heisted from an old-time bail bondsman’s office. By clicking open the various cabinets, you can stream every song that Young ever released and a growing portion of his unreleased songs in information-rich file formats and play them back through a DAC, which is a digital-to-analog converter device that approximates the sound of good vinyl.

“What I do with my life now is I try and preserve what I did so that decades from now it will still be there,” Young said. “I wish I could do this for Frank Sinatra. I wish I could do it for Nelson Riddle. I wish I could do it for all of the great jazz players. I wish I could do it for all the great songwriters and musicians and everybody who recorded during the time and before the time that I did. But I can’t.”

There are audiophiles who mutter politely but approvingly about Neil’s crusades. And there are the non-gear-heads who remain passionate about American popular music and the miracles it contains. Ooooh-la-la-la, la-la-la-la. That’s the harmony on “Down by the River,” and it’s glorious, right? Your whole brain relaxes in a warm bath of sound. Now try to feel that pure glory and relaxation, that sense of wide-open spaces, the unique confluence of cultures and sounds that together make up America’s purest and least-expected gift to humanity and all the history and pain and loneliness and satisfaction behind it, in a lo-fi digital stream.

At the center of Young’s efforts are his own engineers, who are at least as important to him as Old Black, his favored Gibson Les Paul. “He wants the honesty of what went down, not some pasted-together overdubbed representation that’s not the truth,” Jon Hanlon, one of his favorite engineers, told me from the modest beach house where he takes breaks from recording and remastering miles of Young’s tapes. When we met, he had just completed mastering a 1973 live performance at the Roxy of “Tonight’s the Night,” which is one of Young’s finest and most harrowing records. The rawness of the anger and the sorrow and the joy that are all mixed up together on that record transcends any particular cut. “The truth is that the human condition is imperfect,” Hanlon says of that record. “He captures that imperfection. He wants to capture it in its birth, at the moment that it happens.”

Hanlon has spent years working his way up the Young recording hierarchy, at the topmost rung of which lived an engineer and producer named David Briggs, whose driving, funny, off-kilter personality is best captured in a photograph that shows him in a cowboy hat holding a long black rifle; the gleam in his eye suggests that he wouldn’t mind shooting someone. “That’s the guy that I wanted to find out about,” Hanlon recalls. When Briggs died, Tim Mulligan, who had been mixing Young’s live shows since the 1970s, inherited some part of Briggs’s mantle. Then came Hanlon, who was brought up to the ranch in 1990 to engineer “Ragged Glory.”

“He’s a control freak,” Hanlon says, in a tone of complete approval. “If he wants your opinion, he’ll ask for it. If he doesn’t, it’s foolhardy to wade in. He’s 10 steps ahead of you in his thought process.”

Young’s favorite place to listen to his own songs isn’t the studio, Hanlon says. It’s behind the wheel of his car. Consciously, you’re driving the car, which leaves your mind more open, which is a trick that Briggs taught Young. “We get on the two-lane blacktop,” Hanlon explains. “There’s something that happens when you drive, without trucks. You hear what comes to the top without focusing too hard.”

The physical condition of 40- and 50-year-old master tapes from the golden age of rock ’n’ roll depends on how they were recorded and stored and on what kind of tape, which is why remastering old recordings is such a pressing necessity and why digital-recording technology, as opposed to low-quality streaming services, can be a gift to musicians, properly deployed. While some types of tape, like Scotch 250 tape, are usually fine, even after decades in storage, other forms of analog tape haven’t fared as well. “Ampex 456 half-inch, quarter-inch tape,” Hanlon says, when I ask about the worst offender. Run it through a pinch roller to play it, and the backing comes off as an oily gunk. You need to bake it in an oven at low heat to reconstitute the backing and make the tape usable. With Young’s old Buffalo Springfield stuff, you could see right through the Mylar, Hanlon says, which means that the music on those tapes, or some of it, is simply gone.

Tim Mulligan has worked together with Neil since “Harvest,” in 1971. His first session was a remote in the old hay barn where Young recorded “Words,” along with “Alabama” and “Are You Ready for the Country.” The guy who knew how to bake Ampex tape, he tells me, was George Horn, a mastering engineer who worked at CBS San Francisco and later at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. “George had a crude setup using a hair dryer and cardboard box,” Mulligan recalls. “We then upgraded to a convection oven with a candy thermometer and timer.” The tapes were carefully rewound, then cleaned, lubricated and repaired until they were playable again and could be rerecorded. After a few precious days, the old tapes turned back into gunk.

The master tapes for “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” were in particularly bad condition, Mulligan recalls. So it’s important to get the work done right and get it done now.

Even engineers in Silicon Valley can hear a difference in the stuff they are selling and what Young’s team is so desperately trying to preserve. As Tim Cook, the head of Apple, recently told a reporter, without any evident trace of humor, “We worry that the humanity is being drained out of music.”

Steve Jobs, Cook’s predecessor, was also a big music fan. “He listened to vinyl in his living room because he could hear real music,” Young told me. “ And he loved music.” When I ask if he ever spoke directly to Jobs about turning Apple’s iTunes into a platform for music that didn’t sound bad, Young nodded.

“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “He said, ‘Send us your masters and I’ll have my guys do what they can with them to make them sound great.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s impossible, your iPod won’t play anything back.’ ”

Jobs disagreed. “He said, ‘Well, our guys can make it so that your music can play back through it.’ And you know he was right,” Young said. “It does play back, and you can recognize it.” He pauses. “But it’s not my music.”

When Jobs’s biographer asked him about Young’s offer, as related in the biography “Becoming Steve Jobs,” Jobs snapped, “[Expletive] Neil Young.”

All of my life, I had never rid myself of the preposterous idea that someday Young would vouchsafe to me some life-altering truth, until one day it happened. My younger son, Elijah, I told Young, has a great ear for music, but his ability to process sensory information is off, which means that he has been drowning since birth in an ocean of sound. This has led to problems with language and balance and nausea. From the time he was born, his hands were also clenched into tiny fists, and they remained that way for over a year. He seemed to be in some kind of pain.

Otherwise, he is a bright, intensely curious child, who is fascinated by the workings of cause and effect and understands language at a normal 5-year-old level but repeats words with great difficulty. To compensate for his deficits, Elijah was blessed with a rock-star smile that can light up a room — a smile so bright and warm that he learned to use it to distract people from his obvious physical discomfort, in a world that was always wobbling and flipping over, and from his inability first to talk and then to pick up small objects or insert a screw into a bolt. Instead, he smiled at people. When they asked him his name, his inability to produce intelligible sounds made him turn away quickly in frustration, which was usually interpreted as shyness. He would try to build a tower out of blocks, then knock down all the blocks. Then he would turn back to them, laugh and flash that smile.

A child in pain is a tragedy and a burden that can be all-consuming, but that’s not how I experience Elijah. He is my friend. He is a source of joy and love and warmth, who has also been the cause of several hundred sleepless nights, which can in turn be the source of soaring anxiety. Thanks to Elijah, I have become aware that speech is a conscious act that requires the coordination of 32 muscles in the mouth, 16 of which affect the shape and positioning of the tongue.

It could be cerebral palsy, a light case, perhaps, Young replied, in an oblique reference to his sons. It is something like that, but it’s not that, so I wasn’t sure exactly how to answer. It’s not genetic. It’s not fatal. Something was inflaming his young brain, disrupting the formation of healthy neural connections; the cause might be historical, or ongoing. Either way, there were kinks in the channels through which sights and sounds flowed. Either those channels had to be ironed out or new ones had to be opened up.

I asked Young what it does to a marriage to have a child like that. Neil has been married three times. His ex-wife, Pegi, Ben’s mom, was a singer-songwriter and environmentalist but died on Jan. 1, 2019, of cancer. She had worked with Young, to whom she was married for 36 years, before divorcing in 2014, to establish the Bridge School.

“It’s good for the marriage,” he said firmly. “If it’s a good marriage, it brings the marriage even closer together. It’s one of life’s great experiences. It’s an enriching thing because it teaches you the value of love.”

Young’s immersion in a program of intensive therapy for his son Ben led him to become obsessed with new ways of hearing and modulating sound. His album “Trans” was a monument to his attempts to communicate with Ben and to find a musical language that could convey what Ben was hearing — and perhaps even serve some therapeutic purpose. As Neil put it to his biographer Jimmy McDonough, the album was “the beginning of my search for a way for a nonoral person, a severely physically handicapped nonoral person, to find some sort of interface for communication. The computers and the heartbeat all have to come together here — where chemistry and electronics meet.”

In that moment, talking about our sons, I realized how all of Young’s obsessions fit together: They are centered in a common understanding of experience and how it shapes us. Human development is led by our senses. Our senses exert a formative and shaping pressure on our brains. So if our experience of the world around us can damage our brains and our souls, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that music can also help us feel better. Every musician, and every music fan, believes that.

It was this belief that led me to the work of a French doctor named Alfred Tomatis, who, in the late 1940s and ’50s, began manipulating sound in the hope of healing people. Among his patients were opera singers and fighter pilots, whose brains had stopped processing sound correctly as a result of work-induced auditory trauma. Because our fight-or-flight response is connected to our auditory system, any disturbances can cause a host of physical symptoms. Tomatis came up with a treatment that involved decreasing or emphasizing specific frequencies of what he believed to be particularly salient forms of music — including Gregorian chants and the music of Mozart, which is perhaps the most perfectly structured and at the same time most effortlessly fluid sound that human beings have ever made (at once the most human and the most perfect music on the planet). These interventions helped retune the muscles that control the auditory pathways through which sound makes its way to the brain.

In the 1950s, Tomatis successfully used his techniques to help opera singers whose prolonged and eventually traumatic exposure to their own vocal extremes left them unable hear high and midrange sounds. After graduating from medical school, he worked for the French Air Force, where he noticed that prolonged exposure to certain ranges of sound produced by factory machinery and jet engines produced a range of negative physiological and psychological effects, in addition to hearing loss.

But Tomatis’s methods languished in relative obscurity for the second half of the 20th century in part because they didn’t align with the then-dominant machine model of our brains, which suggested the organ contained a set of parts that performed specific functions. Once broken, those functions could not be restored.

The machine model of the brain “has been a disaster clinically,” says the psychiatrist Norman Doidge, who over the past decade has popularized much of the pioneering work in the science of neuroplasticity in two best-selling books. “We now know that mental and sensory experience and activity actually change the brain’s ‘wiring’ or connections,” Doidge told me. As Eric Kandel, one of Doidge’s teachers at Columbia, defined it, “Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change its behavior as a result of experience.” In 2000, Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology.

At dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant in Toronto, I told Doidge about Elijah. What particularly interested me, I said, was that his symptoms mirrored those of a child to whom Doidge had devoted a case history in his second book. Could he help us?

Maybe, he said. With proper reshaping of his auditory cortex, Elijah’s balance might get better and his nausea might stop, which would in turn make it possible for him to develop more normally. Doidge suggested that we take Elijah to the Listening Center in Toronto for an assessment. The center is run by Paul Madaule, who was first Tomatis’s patient in France, then his assistant.

Coincidentally, I added, Young experiments with masking and distorting sound contained some similar ideas. He had two sons with cerebral palsy. “He was probably on to something,” Doidge said.

Spending a day and a night in downtown Fresno, Calif., is like walking into the dreamscape of a midperiod Neil Young album, with once-glorious movie palaces taken over by churches that minister to addicts and drunks. The signs along the way advertise Aladdin Bail Bonds, the Mezcal Lounge and the Lucky You Tattoo parlor. One of the messages of Neil Young’s music has always been that flat spaces are lonely, and the people who inhabit them feel small.

In the next year, Young would announce that he was releasing a book about sound, “To Feel the Music,” written with Phil Baker, who helped developed the PonoPlayer. He also found enough new inspiration to record an album with Crazy Horse, his first in seven years, called “Colorado.” While I was in town, I was able to catch a show.

Fresno’s sizable vagrant population was distinguishable from the concertgoers clustered outside the Warnors Theater mainly by the amount of dust on their shoes. The concert had been announced only a week earlier, which meant that pretty much everyone there was a local — the kind of audience that Young likes best. The inside of the Warnors Theater has been perfectly restored, with a high gilded ceiling and gorgeous acoustics.

“I’m still living the dream we had/For me, it’s not over,” Young sang onstage, facing his band, Crazy Horse, with Nils Lofgren on guitar. There was something clumsy and vulnerable in the way that the men faced each other onstage, bowing back and forth as they soloed in a show of old-school male competitive affection.

“Thanks for coming out,” he told the crowd when he was done. “We appreciate it. Glad you could get those tickets. I like seeing you people here.” A cigar-store Indian hovered over his shoulder. I counted only four people in the audience who were holding up phones. He played “Tired Eyes,” then “Powderfinger,” flailing away at his big old guitar laid across his bouncy gut. “You are like a hurricane/There’s calm in your eye/I wanna love you but I’m getting blown away.”

“God bless you, Neil,” an old hippie lady in a blowzy floral dress shouted. Maybe he only looked cranky. He finished another song and gazed up at the ceiling in wonderment, admiring the great cathedral of sound in which he was standing.

I don’t know if the evils that Neil Young is warning us about will come to pass. I don’t know if G.M.O. seeds are truly killing us or if all the missing information that Silicon Valley is engineering out of music and the rest of our lives is doing something truly evil to our brains or whether these are simply the latest obsessions of a habitually cranky, inventive, restless man.

There are plenty of neurologists who remain skeptical of the idea that sound can help rewire people’s brains. What I can also tell you is this: I listen to rich audio files through a decent-quality DAC and I hear more, and it makes me feel better. Also: I don’t know when or how or if certain parts of my son’s brain will get unstuck. I don’t know whether he will learn to talk in a way that his friends or teachers or people besides me and my wife and his brother and sister can easily understand. I’m not even sure what degree of change is desirable. Some brains, like Neil Young’s and Joni Mitchell’s, are just wired differently.

That said, I will never forget watching Elijah during the first week of his therapy in Toronto, as modified Mozart was piped into his brain and he just suddenly looked down at his little fist and started opening and closing his hand for the first time — because suddenly, he could. After the second session, six weeks later, his reflexes and fine-motor skills had markedly improved, to the point where he could catch a ball or slap his mother across the face when she says “no” to his request for another marshmallow. He isn’t nauseated anymore. He can walk and even run, while continuing to be a joy to be around. Just the other day, in the bath, waiting for his mother to come home, he looked at me and said, “Oh, me home, Mama!”

I listened to the tapes that Elijah was hearing, on which Mozart’s perfect sound was continuously interrupted by filtering that sounded like static, before it then reasserted itself — an effect that is familiar to any Neil Young fan. The filtering effects had helped in whatever way to heal Elijah’s brain. So what is the effect of engineering so much complexity out of the music we listen to, and replacing it with fake, jacked-up sounds, doing to my brain and to yours?

It’s strange to imagine that Young might be a prophet of sorts — but maybe not. His lesson is that everything human is shot through with imperfection. Filtering that out doesn’t make us more perfect; it is making us sick. He’s a great artist, which means that he sees and hears more, which may make him a loon, but is also why he is still worth listening to.

“These places are so great,” Young said onstage in Fresno. “We’re so lucky they’re still here.” He sang, in fine voice: “He came dancing across the waters/With his galleons and guns.” At 73, he is still a man walking through a hurricane, which begins inside a perfect melody that dissolves into dissonance and feedback, inside of which there is something wonderfully, miraculously whole.

David Samuels is the author of “The Runner” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” He last wrote for the magazine about Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s foreign-policy guru.

#tech #technology #musica #music #musicians #must reads #pop music #tech news #news #latest news #entertainers #arts and entertainment #entertainment #u.s. news #u.s. politics #woodstock

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mikemortgage · 6 years

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‘Canada Post is dying before our eyes’: Strike exposes how postal service has changed in online era

TORONTO — The Canada Post of today that finds itself struggling through rotating strikes is a very different organization from the postal service that last saw labour disruptions.

Back in 2011, as the company faced a labour dispute that led to its first loss in 17 years, then-CEO Deepak Chopra unveiled a plan to restructure the centuries-old institution to adapt to major structural changes brought on by the internet, including both a plunge in lettermail and a rise in packages.

“Starting in 2007, letter volumes started to collapse like a stone,” said Ian Lee, an associate professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, who has studied the crown corporation.

“That was their bread and butter, their core business, and their most profitable. Vastly, by far their most profitable product was lettermail. They charged lots of money, and it cost very little to deliver it.”

Ottawa ready to order end to Canada Post strike if no deal within ‘next few days’

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Canada Post asks for halt to international shipments as parcel backlog grows

By 2011 the Canada Post Group of Companies, which includes subsidiary Purolator Holdings Ltd. and others, was handling about 10 billion pieces of mail a year for a 1.8-billion drop from 2007. Last year, total volume came in at 8.4 billion as the service has sustained a steady drop in its core business of transaction mail made of up letters, bills, statements, invoices and other paperwork that’s now gone digital.

In response, the company switched emphasis to its parcel service, which for years had stood at a fairly stable level.

But the transition hasn’t been easy, said Lee, since unlike lettermail, parcel services have stiff competition from major international players like UPS and Fedex.

“People say, ok well great, you lost one product line, you get another product line. It’s not that simple…this is a very competitive space, there is no monopoly.”

Still, a rapid rise in overall parcels being sent out to consumers has helped Canada Post record significant gains in the space.

As lettermail declines, Canada Post has made significant gains in its parcel delivery service.

Last year, parcel revenue came in at $2.1 billion, or about 33 per cent of Canada Post revenue, up from about $1.3 billion or 21 per cent of revenue in 2011.

Parcel volume has climbed from about 143 million packages in 2011 to 242 million last year for an almost 70 per cent increase, as the service has also looked to increase convenience of the service with delivery lockers, self-service drop-offs, and same day delivery in Toronto and Montreal.

In a 2016 annual report, Canada Post said it delivered nearly two thirds of online orders by Canadians.

Lee said the service has been competitive, offering somewhat cheaper rates than private operators, but it’s been saddled with labour costs, a large pension obligation, and a culture slow to change.

“Canada Post, which for over 200 years was a protected monopoly of the state, is dying before our eyes, but the culture hasn’t caught up,” he said.

Pivoting has been hampered by difficult labour relations, pension obligations, as well as the structure of the service itself, said Malcolm Bird, associate professor of political science at the University of Winnipeg.

“They’ve got difficult labour relations, political interference in their operations, they’ve got to deliver mail to everywhere regardless of the cost, so there may be a few little advantages, but I suspect they would be far outweighed by their public service role.”

A government discussion paper noted that labour costs are about 41 per cent higher than comparable businesses in the private sector.

Canada Post has to deliver to every address in Canada, but the number of addresses are increasing while each customer is using the service less. Parcel deliveries is a way to offset some of its costly obligations, said Bird.

“Canada Post, in raw political terms, it provides mail and package delivery services to rural and small town Canada, and the north, places where private companies provide limited service, if at all….this universal service obligation is at the absolute core of its political mandate.”

Idle Canada Post trucks sit in the parking lot of the Saint-Laurent sorting facility in Montreal amid a rotating strike.

The requirements of delivery are what pushed the service into the community mailbox program and away from door-to-door delivery, a move that was expected to save about $400 million a year before the Trudeau government shelved the plan.

Despite steady declines of between around four and eight per cent per year, lettermail still provides the bulk of Canada Post’s revenues. Last year transactional mail pulled in $2.9 billion to make up 45 per cent of revenue, down from $3.2 billion or 54 per cent in 2011. Advertising, or direct marketing mail, makes up the other main segment for the service at $1.1 billion in revenue last year.

The strike, however, threatens its core business further, since companies have been using it to encourage more people to switch to digital, said Bird.

“Every single company that still provides paper letters, paper bills to people, is trying to use these rotating strikes to make even more people go on to electronic bills and get rid of paper.”

The rotating strike has also shown the waning necessity of the postal service, said Lee.

“They had enormous leverage in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s because the strike would cripple, literally cripple the economy because it brought the payment system to its knees.”

Today it is an inconvenience for small businesses and customers ordering online, but hardly critical, he said.

“It’s a bit of an inconvenience, but it’s not the end of the world like it once was.”

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rogue-artists · 6 years

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Almost Canada’s Last Cigarette Commercial.

Allan Sneath worked for McKim Advertising in Montreal. McKim was Canada’s oldest advertising agency and had been responsible for many effective communicating concepts including Canada’s first bank ads. The film production house director received a phone call from Allan Sneath on Sunday. He requested that the director be on a plane to Calgary the following day with a cameraman, a crew of film-makers and a pair of running shoes because the commercials he had to shoot must be completed very quickly. An explanation on the plane included the information that a person who watched the activities of American owned Marlborough Cigarettes for Canadian owned Imperial Tobacco, had, on Sunday, warned Imperial Tobacco that Marlborough was going to introduce their cigarettes into Canada. A strong and well advertised brand name like Marlborough would do Imperial Tobacco’s brands considerable damage. The ‘spy’ who seemed to have very specific information, claimed Marlborough’s first step would be to run test commercials in Peterborough, Ontario. Allan Sneath’s job was to make three competing commercials that could run in Peterborough at the same time. The Marlborough images were of very strong, healthy looking Montana cowboys riding, roping and living in the outdoors. Allan’s plan was to make commercials with images of strong, healthy, Alberta cowboys. Marlborough had the advantage of time but Imperial Tobacco had an interesting advantage of its own. A smart Imperial executive had, long ago, purchased the rights to the name Marlborough in Canada. If the American Marlborough was going to invade Canada, they had to give the product a different name. The U.S settled on the name Maverick. Allan Sneath’s commercials for Imperial Tobacco could carry the name Marlborough. The Americans put the name Maverick on the papers of their Marlborough cigarettes. Imperial Tobacco took their Belvedere cigarette and rewrapped them with the name Marlborough. Meanwhile, in a field at the Rafter Six Ranch near Canmore Alberta, the director was bouncing along in an old truck as the crew shot a stampede of thirty horses and two handsome cowboys. With that segment completed, they raced over to the Kananaskis River to film a pack train of mountain horses, led by the same, freshly mounted cowboys. The following morning, the director and his crew arrived early at Horseshoe Canyon near Drumheller. They pulled into the viewpoint above the canyon at 3:00 AM to catch a sunrise that was to appear at 4:30. At 4:00 the camera, crew and cowboy were ready but the man with the single sheep that the story needed, had not arrived. At least the worried director didn’t think he had. Finally in a desperate state, he went over to the only other car in the parking area and woke the man who was sound asleep at the wheel. “Of course I have the sheep,” he said. “It’s in the trunk.” When the trunk was opened, a sheep that had never seen a car before, became airborne. The sheep owner fought the leaping, bouncing, frantic animal down into the canyon, found a few blades of grass, tethered it and left it in to recover. Almost Canada’s Last Cigarette Commercial. No. 1 The story the filmmakers were shooting was about a handsome cowboy who looked all day for a lost sheep until, as the sun set, he came upon it beside the canyon wall. The earlier searching portions had already been shot and the sunrise that was to pretend it was a sunset in the story, was what they were attempting to shoot. The sun was an inch above the horizon when the cowboy spotted the sheep and rode towards it. The sheep that had never seen a car, had also never seen a horse, so as the large dark thing with a man thing ontop approached, the sheep pulled its stake and ran for its life. It should be mentioned that in addition to the problems the director already had, the horse had never seen a sheep! When the sheep bolted south, the horse bolted north. The cowboy was good at his job; he rode the horse to submission, then gently led it to the patch where the sheep had been and tied it to a stone. He turned to the harried director and asked, “If you would bring the sheep back here and give me five minutes, I will make it possible for you to finish your shot.” The director, if a little doubtful, was thrilled. The sun was a foot above the horizon. Ten minutes later, the sheep was lifted and placed in the arms of the cowboy. Asking everone to step back, he proceeded to walk in circles around the nervous horse. The smell of the sheep began to mix with the smells of the man and the sheep/man that was walking circles around him, became less frightening. The horse calmed and the man/sheep moved closer until the cowboy was rubbing the sheep back and forth along the horse, again mixing smells. The cowboy quietly asked, “roll the camera please” and hearing the camera start, he gently lifted the sheep onto the horses withers then swung aboard behind it. The rising sun was only a little bit past where it should be for sunset. The commercials were edited in time and sent out from Toronto. The Canadian cigarette ads were shown on the same day, in Peterborough, as the American cigarettes. The stores displayed the two packages side by side. Smokers were confused and both products were dead in a week. The Americans withdrew, their attempt to launch a cigarette into the Canadian market failed. The Marlborough name went back to bed in a vault in Montreal. Alan Sneath smiled a little smile. ____________________________________

William Irish

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daddyslittlejuliet · 7 years

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12 Animal Activism Stories That Made Headlines in 2017

When I look back on this year’s wins for animals, what I am most struck by is a genuine sense of accomplishment. Yes, we have a long, long way to go. But from the skyrocketing popularity of veganism to the bans on various forms of animal cruelty, 2017 has been a year of encouraging news. Here’s a look at some of the top stories.

1. Croatia bans fur farms (January)

The year got off to a great start with Croatia’s prohibition on fur farms going into effect on January 1. The ban—which comes 10 years after the introduction of the 2006 Animal Protection Act—applies to the few remaining chinchilla farms and was the result of both activists and the general public speaking out against this cruel industry. Indeed, more and more countries have or are considering legislation to ban fur farming, including Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway.

2. Germany bans meat at official functions (January)

Hoping to lead by example, Germany’s Federal Minister for the Environment Barbara Hendricks banned animal flesh from being consumed at all official government functions. “We want to set a good example for climate protection, because vegetarian food is more climate-friendly than meat and fish,” she said. Animal agriculture has been linked not only to climate change (accounting for nearly 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions), but to species extinction, ocean dead zones, water pollution, deforestation, soil degradation, and habitat destruction.

3. Guatemala passes powerful anti-animal-cruelty legislation (March)

In what was hailed as a milestone for animals, Guatemala adopted one of the world’s most comprehensive anti-cruelty laws—legislation includes protections for animals used in research and circuses, wildlife, and companion animals. It also establishes bans on animal testing for cosmetics and on dogfighting and sets penalties for spectators of this blood “sport.”

4. Judge dismisses charges against activist Anita Krajnc, who gave water to thirsty pigs (May)

Anita Krajnc gives water to pigs in Toronto. Photo by Elli Garlin

When activist Anita Krajnc ignored a truck driver’s demand that she cease giving water to the thirsty pigs he was driving to an Ontario slaughterhouse as he was stopped at a red light in June 2015, she was not only charged with criminal mischief, but video of the confrontation was shared around the world. Anita’s case quickly became a flashpoint of debate, with her defense team famously contending that “compassion is not a crime.”

Though the judge did not necessarily agree with the argument that pigs are persons, not property, he cleared Anita of the charges, which carried potential jail time and a hefty fine. “I think one should always follow their conscience,” she told me days after the judge dismissed the case. “You feel good knowing that what you did was right. You can’t control what other people do, but you can control what you do. So you have to stand up for what you believe in.” (You’ll find the full interview here.)

5. Ringling Bros. Circus closes (May)

This was one of the biggest stories of the year, and activists had good reason to celebrate. After nearly 150 years of abusing elephants, tigers, lions, horses, and other animals, the self-described “Greatest Show in Earth” finally ended. Officially, Ringling’s owners blamed high operating costs and declining ticket sales. But activists had been campaigning against the company almost since the beginning. (Indeed, in 1918, the Jack London Club, named in honor of the late author and animal advocate, staged walkouts from circus performances, which led to the company eliminating big-cat cage acts in 1925, but Ringling brought them back four years later.)

Unfortunately, Ringling’s demise does not mark the end of circuses with animal acts. To learn what you can do, please visit circusprotest.com.

6. Historic vote bans fur farming in Czech Republic (June)

In a vote of 132 to nine, Czech government officials passed a ban on fur farming this year. “This is a victory which proves that killing animals for fashion’s sake is no longer supported among the Czech politicians,” said Chamber Environment Committee chair Robin Böhnisch. “I hope that our legislators will set an example for their colleagues in other countries where fur farming bans are currently being discussed.”

The ban—which goes into effect January 31, 2019, after passing through the country’s Senate—will require the closing of nine remaining fur farms, which collectively hold some 20,000 foxes and minks captive in small battery cages every year and kill them by anal electrocution or gassing.

7. Activists in China rescue 1,000 dogs and cats from truck headed to slaughterhouses (June)

About 100 Chinese activists took part in this remarkable rescue, stopping a transport truck in Guangzhou, a city known as the largest hub for dog and cat meat consumption in the world. Activists said they were assisted by local police and discovered the truck driver did not have a health certificate for the dogs, which is a legal requirement when transporting animals in China. After a standoff that lasted 10 hours, the animals were released from the tightly packed cages. (While some 10 million dogs are consumed in China every year, let’s remember that billions of cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, and other animals are annually raised and killed for their flesh in the United States.)

8. UK’s Advertising Standards says cow’s milk can be called “inhumane” (July)

As the saying goes, the truth hurts. And truth is just what the UK nonprofit Go Vegan World was speaking when they placed a national newspaper advertisement stating that “humane milk is a myth—don’t buy it” (pictured right). The ad continues with text that reads, “I went vegan the day I visited a dairy. The mothers, still bloody from birth, searched and called frantically for their babies. Their daughters, fresh from their mothers’ wombs but separated from them, trembled and cried piteously, drinking milk from rubber teats on the wall instead of their mothers’ nurturing bodies. All because humans take their milk.”

When dairy farmers complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that the ad was inaccurate and misleading, the ASA sided with the vegan campaigners and gave it their approval, saying, “Although the language used to express the claims was emotional and hard-hitting, we understood it was the case that calves were generally separated from their mothers very soon after birth, and we therefore concluded that the ad was unlikely to materially mislead readers.”

9. Gucci drops fur (October)

Citing the “deprivation and cruelty suffered by fur-bearing animals,” fashion giant Gucci announced it will end its use of fur, beginning with its spring collection. “Gucci’s decision will radically change the future of fashion,” said Simone Pavesi, manager of animal-free fashion at the Italian animal rights group LAV. “As fashion becomes more and more ethical, supply chains that revolve around animals will be a thing of the past.”

Gucci will join the Fur Free Alliance, an international group of more than 40 organizations that campaigns on animal welfare and promotes alternatives to fur in the fashion industry.

10. California becomes the first state to mandate that dogs, cats, and rabbits sold in pet stores come from shelters (October)

In a move aimed at breaking the puppy mill and kitten factory supply chain, California lawmakers banned pet stores from selling dogs, cats, and rabbits who do not come from animal shelters and rescue organizations. Not only will this help weaken the unscrupulous trade in “pet” breeding, but it will ease overcrowding in shelters throughout the state. The law, which sets an important precedent for the rest of the country, takes effect on January 1, 2019.

11. Ireland bans circuses with “wild” animals (November)

“The use of wild animals for entertainment purposes in circuses can no longer be permitted” in Ireland, said the country’s Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed. “This is the general view of the public at large and a position I am happy to endorse. This is a progressive move, reflective of our commitment to animal welfare.”

Because other EU nations had established bans on animals in circuses, some campaigners feared Ireland would become a “dumping ground” for animal circuses that had been legislated out of other European countries. The ban begins January 1, 2018.

12. Man rescues rabbit from brush fire (December)

It may seem insignificant in terms of lives saved, but when a California motorist left his vehicle to save a rabbit from a raging brush fire, the video captured by a news crew went viral. As you watch the emotional scene, remember that this is a man who is risking his life to rescue not his beloved companion, but an animal he just happened to see on the side of the road. (As of mid-December, there is some controversy about the identity of the bunny rescuer, but that takes nothing away from this heroic deed.)