COLUMN: Frequencies

Like most of us these days, I need to relax.

2020 has been a bit challenging to say the least. A horrible virus is plaguing our fragile Earth, and for once I don't mean Tom Cruise. Friends of mine have gotten sick and a few of them unfortunately didn't get better. We all yearned for a COVID distraction, but none of us wanted the distraction to be a televised murder in Minnesota. People have taken to the streets in protest, and others have taken to the streets to protest the protestors. Somehow everything's become a political fight and our nation has never been more divided. Oh, and by the way, there's murder hornets, a Saharan dust storm, and bears roaming the Midwest countryside. 

If there truly was ever a time for Calgon to take us away, it's right now.

The other night I found myself enjoying my latest 2020 hobby: insomnia. I've been fighting it occasionally for weeks now. I don't know if it's from the anger, the worry, the frustration, the caffeine, or just the pent-up energy of a day mostly wasted on the couch, but something about bedtime just hasn't been agreeing with me lately. The fastest way to get me sick is to mess up my sleep schedule, and "sick" is a heck of a lot scarier of a word now than it was six months ago.

I've been trying new ways to help fall asleep at night. This week, it backfired and took me down a rabbit hole that kept me up half the night in amazement. 

I got the bright idea to check and see if there were any Youtube clips of sounds & videos to help you relax. I didn't just find a few clips. I found an entire cottage industry of so-called relaxation experts. 

There's multitudes of traditional three-hours-of-a-babbling-brook nature videos. There's creepy homemade ASMR videos, where people film themselves whispering and doing things like eating raw fish on camera, all of which is supposed to fill you with a tingly relaxation -- but I believe people here are confusing "tingly relaxation" with "the heebie-jeebies." There's even an app you can download where boring British voices read boring stories to you boringly, but it didn't help me sleep AND I had to suffer through, I kid you not, the history of lavender. No thanks.

But then I found a new age world I never knew existed: Solfeggio frequencies. Strap in, it's about to get weird.

Solfeggio frequencies are specific oscillating tones of sound that are purported to promote various aspects of body and mind health. They're based on a six-tone musical scale created by an 11th-century monk. In the 1970s, a "doctor" named Joseph Puleo began researching these tones. Supposedly Puleo found sacred numbers and codes in the Bible that, when deciphered using Pythagorean math, revealed specific numeric frequencies that corresponded to this 11th century scale. Puleo claimed that, for instance, listening to "Mi" (as in "do re mi") at precisely 528 Hz promotes healing and mental wellness. "Mi," in fact, is said to derive from the Latin phrase "MI-ra gestorum," or miracle. That's why 528 Hz is considered "the miracle frequency."

Okay, first off, this is fun -- but also bonkers. I am NOT here to rain on anyone's new age parade. I love weird hocum-pocum, and I'm down to try anything. I once attended the annual Psychic & Paranormal Expo in Moline and paid twenty bucks to sit motionless in the center of a crystal pyramid while a white-haired shaman blew a didjeridoo in my face to, you know, fix my chakras or whatever. I am keen on mystical mumbo-jumbo.

But if you ask me, this seems like an especially jumbo bunch of mumbo. Supposedly this ancient scale was used by Tibetan monks to tune their singing bowls -- except the idea of frequencies didn't exist back then, but okay. The original Solfeggio scale was used in everything from Gregorian chants to Mozart's symphonies. After George Frideric Handel died, they found his original tuning fork that he used to compose, and for what it's worth, that tuning fork oscillated at 512 Hz, awfully close to the miracle frequency.

My favorite part of the story comes in 1988, when a biochemist conducted a study that supported the health benefits of the miracle frequency. How did he prove this? Easy. He took vials of human DNA, put them in front of speakers, and blasted them with music. The vials exposed to Gregorian and Sanskrit chants at the miracle frequency absorbed 5-9% more light than the DNA exposed to other musical genres. The DNA exposed to rock music actually deceased UV light absorption, proving once and for all that AC/DC really IS back in black.

I'm a firm believer that the right noise can soothe the savage beast. Anyone's who's been within a half-mile earshot of my car when My Bloody Valentine comes on the stereo can testify to that. Log onto Youtube right now and watch ANY live clip of the band Slowdive playing "Golden Hair" and then try to tell me the power of music can't alter your brainwaves. I once saw Slowdive in concert and had to grasp the railing after every song because it offset my equilibrium so much. They're as loud as a jet engine yet sublimely beautiful. 

Youtube has hours of new age music composed at the miracle frequency, so I gave it a shot. Last night, I went to bed to a video of computer-generated seascapes with a soundtrack that went "wwwwwwwwuuuuuhhhhhhHHHHHHHhhhhHHHHHHhhhhh" for eight hours straight. After one minute, I was relaxed. After twenty, I was pretty annoyed. After thirty, I realized the most miraculous part of the miracle frequency was when you grabbed the remote control and shut it off.

So I dunno. My super scientific thirty-minute test of the miracle frequency is thus far inconclusive, other than proving my working theory that owning a synthesizer and a Youtube channel does NOT make you a master new age musician. I'm still fighting insomnia now and again, but I figured out a trick. Every time I get stressed out, I stop, take a breath, and remember we live in a world where someone somewhere is earning a modest living by cutting up dead people and seeing what happens when you play Bon Jovi to their corpses. There's hope for us all, friends.

COLUMN: Escape to the 80s

I've gotta be honest. When the shelter-in-place order initially came down, there was a tiny part of me that was psyched.

For a guy who revels in laziness, I do an annoying amount of stuff. I write this column. I work in our advertising department. I DJ to a packed dance club every weekend. I work at a friend's retail store. I have a lot of things going on in my life.

The one thing I don't have, though, is enough free time.

Running from job to job while maintaining a modest social life means I'm never home as much as I'd like. As a result, my house is always messy, my cupboards are usually either barren or filled with expired food from the Mesozoic Era, and there's a list of unfinished projects I could show you -- except finishing that list is one of those unfinished projects.

But suddenly there I was, handed a golden opportunity, even if I had to wear gloves and a mask to accept it. By government decree, I had to stay home. Perhaps this was finally the time I needed to whittle down my to-do list.

That was my mindset back in March at least. Here we are in June, a week or so away from Illinois graduating to Stage 4 of reopening, and do you think I've accomplished even ONE of those things on my unfinished list of unfinished projects? NOPE.

Well, okay. I got one thing done.

In my younger and less slothful days, I was a Friday night regular at Bettendorf's Stage 2 teen club. The friendships I made at that crazy club will last a lifetime and the music they played remains the soundtrack that unspools in my brain anytime I find myself in a quiet room.

For years now, friends and fellow Stage 2 alumns have been bugging me to make a mix of all those old-school songs near and dear to our hearts. On the very first week of lockdown, I figured it was just the project to take my mind off toxic diseases and the economic collapse of the free world. Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer would just have to wait -- I had a mix to work out. For nearly two weeks straight, I spent my days in the basement dusting off old vinyl and firing up my turntables. 

In the end, I crafted a three-hour-long megamix of vintage 80s gems I was proud of. (In fact, you can stream it for free right now at mixcloud.com/shane-brown11 if you're so inclined.)

Little did I know, though, that my foray into those classic jams was just the beginning of the nostalgia rabbithole for me. For the past three months, I've pretty much been trapped in the 1980s. 

Pulling out all that old synthpop put me in the mood for more. The next day, I was bopping around the house to Duran Duran. Then came OMD and the Human League. On one sunny quarantine day, I decided it was prudent to go on a country drive blaring Dexy's Midnight Runners to an audience of myself and a few highly confused cows. Every time I reached for something to listen to, it was music recorded some 35 years ago.

And my obsession didn't stop there. I have a DVR currently sitting at 98% capacity, filled to the brim with TV shows I need to catch up on. Instead, what did I decide to binge during lockdown? All eleven seasons of Cheers, which I've probably already seen eleven times over. The Golden Girls, a show I didn't even like IN the 80s. I wasted an entire day watching reruns of Murder She Wrote. I swear to you, if I'd had access to The Love Boat, I probably would've watched it.

The weirdest thing? I didn't even realize I was doing it. I just thought they were songs and shows that fit my mood and sounded entertaining. I wasn't purposely trying to fire up the Way-Back Machine or anything. It just seemed... nice.

For a kid growing up on a farm in rural Galesburg, the 80s were a pretty gentle decade. Watch a show like The Golden Girls and you'll have a couple of chuckles and probably learn a morality lesson by the end of every episode. Listen to 80s radio jams and about the most ribald thing you'll encounter is George Michael wanting your sex, whatever that was supposed to mean. This was a decade where we seriously had popular radio hits telling us we didn't have to take our clothes off to have a good time, we could dance and party all night and drink some cherry wine, uh huh.

Even the murders on "Murder She Wrote" are some of the most polite murders I've ever seen. On today's TV dial, even what passes for bland procedural dramas are usually full of severed heads, serial killers, and stunningly graphic dialogue before the first ad break. Imagine Jessica Fletcher strolling into an episode of "Law & Order SVU." The poor thing would have an aneurysm faster than you could say "Executive Producer Dick Wolf."

Maybe my little nostalgia trip was an attempt to go back to those gentler times. I'm starting to think escaping to the 80s was my subconscious' best effort to flee the assorted civil unrest, murder hornets, and killer viruses that've welcomed us into the not-so-roaring 2020s.

In reality, the 1980s weren't all about walking on sunshine and safety dancing. I seem to recall the 80s having a killer virus of its own, and it wasn't like systemic racism took a decade off or anything. There was also a little thing called the Cold War. Some of those hummable 80s hits are pretty lyrically frightening. "99 Luftballoons" is the most fun you'll ever have bopping around to a song about nuclear annihilation. That was a daily fear back then. I was just a kid in the early 80s, but old enough to remember our school still having "duck and cover" drills. 

Maybe the safety and comfort of my little nostalgia trip had less to do with the 1980s themselves and more with it being the era in which I was a kid. I never cared about the Iran-Contra Affair or the Cold War -- not when there were bikes to ride and video games to play. The only thing that TRULY scared me in the 1980s was the life-sized stuffed St. Bernard my aunt won at the fair and gave me, and my mom wouldn't let me throw it away no matter how maliciously its eyes glared at me all night long. Oh, and then when you finally DID manage to fall asleep, there was always a chance Freddy Krueger would show up and slice you into bits so tiny even Jessica Fletcher wouldn't be able to find them.

So who knows? Maybe dealing with an upside-down world is just a thing we all have to endure from time to troubled time. Maybe one day in 2050, our kids will be sick of worrying about the killer robots or President Baron Trump or whatever the future holds, and they'll go down to their basements and watch reruns of Breaking Bad and listen to Lil Uzi Vert to remind them of simpler, gentler times.

All I know is I need to step out of the 80s and back into the warm viral 2020 sun. Next week, I'll be returning to the DJ booth with guard up and mask donned. If I learned one thing from the 1980s, it's that all we really wanna do is dance with somebody who loves us.

COLUMN: PLUR 2020

One of the TV channels I watch has taken to airing stress breaks. In the middle of their wall-to-wall news coverage of whatever nightmare is plaguing our world this week, they'll suddenly insert thirty seconds of puppies and kitties frolicking in a flower garden. It's probably just filler where an ad would normally go, but it's a nice breather.

We could all use more frolicking puppies and kitties right about now.

It's tough to be the light-hearted columnist in a world where not too many hearts are light these days. 2020 is proving to be a tough year to fix with a few paragraphs about my cats or how much I hate to clean my house (but if you're wondering, my cats remain awesome and my house remains messy.)

For me, the biggest heartbreak in all of this is seeing how divided we've become. Facing problems is hard, but it's harder when you leap on social media only to find some "friend" you haven't seen since high school yelling opinions at you. I'm as guilty of it as anyone else.

Sometimes I just wanna stop and post a picture of a cat to my Facebook page. But I can already envision the comments:

"Aww, what a cute cat."

"CATS ARE TERRIBLE, LIBTARD! #teamdogs"

"They say owning a cat reduces stress levels by 8.5%"

"The WHO just refuted that study."

"The CDC just refuted the WHO study."

"DON'T TRUST ANY STUDIES YOU SEE IN THE MEDIA, SHEEPLE #fakenews"

"Cats matter."

"ALL ANIMALS MATTER!"

"You're a speciesist!"

"Your cat needs a rabies tag."

"VACCINES ARE POISON!"

"THERE IS NO RABIES, PEOPLE. IT'S JUST A BAD FLU!"

"HILARY CLINTON EXPERIMENTS ON CATS IN THE BASEMENT OF A PIZZA PLACE IN NEW JERSEY. #WAKEUP"

By morning, I'd be lucky if Kim Kardashian wasn't hosting a benefit for feline rights or the President wasn't tweeting that my cat is a communist. 

I've always subscribed to the simple premise of being nice to people and wondering why we can't just all get along. Of course, it's probably complacent idealism along those lines that's allowed systemic racism to fester for decades. I get the anger. I understand the tipping points, whether it's witnessing a senseless murder or watching your income dry up while we shelter-in-place. I don't think the answers can be found by torching an Autozone or proudly walking into a crowded room without a mask, but I get the anger. It's palpable and well deserved.

But I swear to you, we can and will get past this. I've seen it before. I've been to places where we all got along without pretense or drama. It's possible. Maybe we just need a good beat.

Most people graduate college and join the work force. I had the bright idea to become a rave promoter.

You remember raves, right? Find an inconspicuous warehouse, pack it with as many kids and loudspeakers as logistically possible, and then blast thumping house music at inhuman volumes from dusk to dawn. For much of the early 1990s, it was my life -- and for a while, it felt like utopia.

Every good movement has its slogan. In the rave community, that slogan was PLUR -- "Peace, Love, Unity, Respect." It was the credo of the scene, and it held true more often than not. No one was turned away from a rave. No one was judged or marginalized -- if you liked house music in the early 90s, you were marginalized enough as is. Raves were a safe space to hang with like-minded weirdos and dance like lunatics without anyone caring.

Out of boredom, last week I hooked up my old VCR and went through a pile of unlabeled VHS tapes in my closet. The very first was footage from a 1994 rave I helped organize in downtown Davenport. We had 1100 people at that party, and watching that tape was even better than frolicking kitties.

We didn't even notice at the time, but it was a sea of diversity. No one cared what race you were. No one cared if you liked boys or girls or if you were a Republican or a Democrat. It was just a big collective of weirdos celebrating each other, their shared love of dance culture, and their shared future early-onset hearing loss (hey, nothing's perfect.)

We had licensed, uniformed security at every event we organized. They were usually really bored. In over 100 events, the worst thing I saw was a yelling match in a bathroom, and strangers had already self-policed the scuffle before we even caught wind of it.

Of course, utopias seldom last, and neither did raves. Like most fads, crowds shrank after a few years. In larger cities, drugs and crime and cops put the kibash to most parties. I'm sure those same issues would have filtered down here eventually had we not retired from party promoting at the wise old age of 24. But those glory days were something special, and I'm proud to have played a part. 

I'm not an idiot -- I know we can't solve racial disparity, airborne pandemics, or political strife with a well-choreographed dance-off. Real life is not the "Beat It" video, which is good because I'm a terrible dancer. But I know we can do better than this. 

At the very least, let's try and inject some PLUR into our lives. We can and should talk about the issues plaguing our world. But we should be able to do it without yelling, looting, doxxing, mask-shaming, trolling, or murdering our fellow humans.

Call me a snowflake if you want. I won't be able to hear you. My ears are still ringing from that party back in 1994.

COLUMN: Scanner Addict

The year was 1987.

Your intrepid columnist had just managed the impossible. Someway, somehow, he had convinced the State of Illinois that he was responsible enough to control a motor vehicle, and he had the shiny new driver's license to prove it. But that was only the first basecamp needed to climb the larger mountain: somehow convincing his notoriously over-protective parents that he was mature enough to take the car out on a Saturday night.

You see, kids, once upon a time, in a world devoid of smart phones, Pokemon Go, and all-night raves, the youth of America had but one ritualistic pasttime on a Saturday night: unnecessary repetitive driving. We called it "cruising the strip." In my hometown of Galesburg, it was a simple course of driving from the McDonalds on Main St. to the other McDonalds on Henderson St. And then back again. And then back again. Over and over and over until we depleted our gas tanks, our curfews, and our fragile ecosystem. And if you were sixteen years old and couldn't hit the strip on a Saturday night? You would just die. It was, like, SO important.

I don't know how I managed to convince my parents, but somehow I pulled it off. That night, I peeled out of my driveway a champion, a triumphant rebel behind the wheel of my 1978 Plymouth Horizon, wood grain paneling against the wind, looking for adventure or whatever came my way. After picking up the requisite carload of friends, it wasn't long before we found ourselves caught in the love embrace between the two McDonalds, yelling at friends and giving others the silent look that said in a glance, "Hey, you're cruising the strip. I am cruising the strip as well. We are super cool and shall live forever."  

It was about this time I happened to pull alongside my friend Aaron, a fellow freshly-minted driver. He revved his engine, as you do when you're a teenage idiot. I revved mine, since I was also a teenage idiot. The light turned green. Suffice to say I won. My prize? A speeding ticket from a kindly Galesburg officer, on my very first night behind the wheel. As it turns out, I wasn't born to be wild. That night, I was born to be grounded.

As I dropped my friends off and headed home, I tried to figure out the best way to break the news to my parents. Should I go with calm and mature? Or should I opt for weeping and mercy? Turns out it didn't matter. My parents were already waiting by the door, arms crossed and judgemental as you'd expect. I should've known better. There was no need to break the news to my parents. The minute that officer called my name over the police radio, he was breaking the news to my grandfather. My folks knew before the ink on the ticket had dried.

Whenever we visited my grandparents' house, us kids had the run of the place. Except, that is, for one desk we couldn't touch. On it sat my grandfather's rather impressive CB radio and police scanner command center. Most nights, he'd sit there for hours, listening to the seedier happenings in and around Galesburg. I never thought one day I'd do the same. Help me, Quad Cities. I may have just become a scanner person.

In the wake of this week's civil unrest, scanner culture has exploded -- and the Quad Cities is no exception. On Monday night, the QC police & EMS feed was the most listened to scanner stream in the country. But MY recent obsession with the local police scanner started before the unrest and heartache of this week. Last month, there was a shooting in my neighborhood. Thankfully it wasn't on my block, but it was close enough to rattle my windows and send me to the basement for a little while.

When I got brave enough to look out, I could see the glow of police lights a few streets away. I'm nothing if not nozy, so I hopped online and listened to the scanner for a bit to see if I could eke any details. The next weekend, I got a text from a panicked friend -- this time it was HER turn to live near a shooting incident. Within minutes, we were BOTH tuned into the scanner feeds, eager for information. Since then, I've listened every evening, and especially with the recent turmoil and tragedy, it's a tough addiction to break.

For a scanner novice like me, though, it's often hard to follow. I don't know a thing about police lingo, and I wouldn't know a 10-4 from a 10-54. One of the easiest ways to listen to our local police is through a stream on Broadcastify.com, a website and app known for its scanner streams. But the QC feed scans through EVERY local police and EMS band at once. It's constantly bouncing from Moline to Davenport to Rock Island to Bettendorf. As you'd expect, this can be a tad frustrating.

The other night, I was trying to follow along with the radio chatter of a high speed car chase that crossed state lines. But every few seconds, it would cut away from the car chase to another city, where some poor officer was responding to a 911 call about a kid throwing a temper tantrum because mom wouldn't let him ride a moped. Now, I realize that everyone's problems are different and that 911 is an invaluable resource for all sorts of emergencies, but at that moment, I found myself seething in contempt for Moped Kid who I've never and most likely never will meet.

Just then, I got a text from a friend. It read "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST GIVE THE KID A MOPED ALREADY."

That's when I realized maybe sitting in front of a police scanner all night isn't the healthiest of hobbies, unless you're (a) the police or (b) our thankless reporters upstairs right now with one ear constantly glued to our newsroom's scanners. At the end of the day, you're pretty much just being a Nozy Nancy eavesdropping on someone's worst day ever. There's a fine line between listening to police scanners for information and listening for entertainment, and that's a line we should never cross.

The next night sealed the deal for me. I hopped on the scanner JUST long enough to hear -- you guessed it -- a friend's son getting pulled over. And yep, I called my friend to let her know. Then I stopped and looked in a mirror to make sure I hadn't COMPLETELY turned into my grandpa. At this rate, it won't be long before I'm putting peanuts in my Pepsi, mixing jelly into my mashed potatoes, and eating peanut brittle without any teeth (my grandpa was an interesting guy.)

I miss him like crazy, and I'd like to think he's up there somewhere with a desktop full of the finest hi-fidelity eavesdropping equipment heaven can provide. As for me? I'm giving the scanner a rest and letting people live their most horrible moments with one less uninvited audience member. Besides, I've got TV to watch. There's a 6-hour marathon of "Cops" starting...