Apparently, I take more time to read good books than trashy books; the Rucka novels took a few days each – part of that, though, was also that the start of the week is heavier workwise and leaves me with less time to read – but the Star Trek book I ripped through in a couple of evenings despite it being longer than either Finder or Smoker. Go figure.
I will, at some point, write something about the trilogy of Keeper, Finder and Smoker; re-reading them this time, one right after the other, I realized that there’s a really clear narrative arc in the three books that I hadn’t realized before, with Rucka playing with expectations in the last of the three after shaping them in the first two – Plus, I had forgotten about Erika, one of the Kodiak series’ main characters, almost entirely until this re-read, and now I’m weirdly obsessed with her. So, when I have more time and/or brainspace, that’ll happen for sure.
The Trek book was… eh, pretty crappy, really; I would’ve given up more than once, but had nothing else to read and saw it through to an end that was, indeed, bitter. Normally, Peter David’s Trek books have more pace and humor to them, but this was a leaden, self-important thing that trudged on and made the reader earn every chapter up until the last third or so.
It sounds like an odd thing to say, but what I love most about “Bad Ambassador” by the Divine Comedy – probably my favorite song from the band, although I suspect I’m almost alone in that – is the tension between all the moving parts; the rising piano and strings as Neil Hannon’s voice sinks, singing “I wanna hold your hand/Hey, what’s your favorite band, honey?” or the way that the piano’s four notes at 2:19 act as a period, ending the tentative “Maybe some other time” (Notice the short rises and falls of the instruments in the background, as if it’s hopes rising and being pushed down by nerves, before those notes, and then everything swells amazingly, incredibly).
It’s such an unashamedly emotional song, so dramatic and aching with unrequited passion (Think of the way that the song is just a list of what Hannon wants to do, including “Play with the big boys/I wanna ride with the tough guys/On a Japanese motorbike,” but, as he goes on say, “Maybe some other time…”). The song even ends with a long fade that makes you think of ellipses, unfulfilled promise. It’s a song where the music is the text as much as the lyrics, one that tells a story in under four minutes and in that short time make you want the best for the character singing. Good job, Neil Hannon.
Written, it’s said, for Frank Sinatra – who apparently didn’t get the joke, and turned it down – “Lonely At The Top” remains one of the greatest missed opportunities in music from the last few decades. It’s one thing for the Randy Newman of the 1970s to sing “All the applause/And all the fame/And all the money/That I have made” because, well, at the time he wasn’t getting a lot of any of those, so it can be taken as sarcastic commentary on celebrity, but if it’d been Sinatra singing those words at the time… Well, that’d take things at least one stage more meta, wouldn’t it? How would his audiences have taken the line “Listen, all you fools out there/Go on and love me/I don’t care”?
(Missing in that video is the spectacular arrangement from the original version, which uses the orchestra to create something that’s both very Newman-esque and also, somehow, fit for Sinatra:
…I think, weirdly, it’s the horns that make it feel Sinatra-esque, although I can’t really think of any songs of his where the oompah thing happened often; Nelson Riddle was normally more subtle than that. But that banjo in the background feels wonderfully disrespectful, out of place and comedic, doesn’t it…?)
Of course, the song has been covered many times since its appearance; I think the Divine Comedy version gets the decadent, sad glamor of the idea best, for me:
Robbie Williams has, I’ve been told, performed the song live a couple of times, which seems particularly fitting; he has the fame, the humor and the sadness to “get” what Newman was trying to say in the first place. Maybe, one day, we’ll see a Justin Beiber version when he finally gets around to his big band album…
What’s that you say? The best theme song for any movie ever made? It’s not something that I’d necessarily argue too much against, I have to admit (Just listen to that guitar; the production on this song just makes me smile so broadly, it’s crazy. Plus, the line about “If knowledge hangs around your neck like pearls instead of chains, then you’re a lucky man” is just the right side of 1970s indulgence and faux wisdom for me). Considering the exhausting marathon of work that today has ended up being, this seems like a good one to leave the internet with for the day. Time to go searching for the meaning of the truth in this whole world…
Most of us journalists have one great idea every few months, maybe two if we drink industrial levels of caffeine. For professional thinkers like Gladwell and Lehrer, the key to maintaining a remunerative career is to milk your best ideas until there’s no liquid left and pray you’ve bought yourself enough time to conjure up new ones.
Given that continuous cycle of creation and reuse, blogging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired.
I’m too filled with deadlines (Blogging deadlines, of course) to respond to this story the way I want right now, and my brain is too scattered to come up with the coherence that I’d need anyway, but I wanted to pull out that above quote nonetheless. I find it particularly compelling because it points out the weird unforgiving cycle of blogging versus fresh ideas, and how exhausting it is; talking to Kate this morning about everything that lay ahead today, I told her that I owe Time a new set of pitches for next week’s essay, even though this week’s only went live this morning. “You need to do that already?” she asked. It is, admittedly, a strange and exhausting rhythm to find yourself in.
This may be the greatest opening page to a comic that I’ve seen in years, both in terms of writing and visuals. Just wonderfully ambitious and evocative; you know immediately whether you’re in or out for the whole thing from this one page alone (It’s the first page of Zaucer of Zilk by Brendan McCarthy and Al Ewing, which ran in 2000AD recently and hopefully will get a collected edition sooner rather than later).
There’s something in Robert Schneider’s vocals in every The Apples in Stereo song that feels as if it turns what could be a classic, sparkly and sparky pop song into something far sleepier. Listen to the rifftastic opening to “What’s The #?” and keep going until Schneider starts singing, and you can feel the energy in the song shift downwards. It’s a weird and wonderful gift; even when he starts screaming “‘Bout you and me!” at 1:28, there’s still something really laidback happening.
Robert Schneider, then: Power-pop’s most lethargic frontman.
In the early days of my career, when I was young, I used to happily work long hours and regularly pull all-nighters. It was fun and I enjoyed my job. However, this set a habit in my working life that continued far longer than was healthy. Eventually I became stressed and fell ill. In the end things became so bad that I was completely unproductive.
This high-intensity working also sets a baseline for the whole industry, where it becomes the norm to work at this accelerated speed. No longer are we working long hours because we want to, but rather because there is an expectation we should. This kind of work/life balance can only end one way, in burnout. This damages us personally, our clients and the industry as a whole. It is in our own interest and those of our clients to look after our health.
This means we cannot spend our lives sitting in front of a screen. It simply isn’t healthy. Instead we need to participate in activities beyond our desks. Preferably activities that involve at least some exercise. A healthy diet wouldn’t hurt either. Getting away from the Web (and Web community) offers other benefits too. It is an opportunity for us to interact with non Web people. Whether you are helping a charity or joining a rock climbing club, the people you meet will provide a much more realistic view of how ‘normal’ people lead their lives.
This will inform our work. I often think that, as Web designers, we live in a bubble in which everybody is on twitter all day, and understands that typing a URL into Google isn’t the best way to reach a website. Not that this is all we will learn from others. We can also learn from other people’s jobs. For example, there is a lot we can learn from architects, psychologists, marketeers and countless other professions. We can learn from their processes, techniques, expertise and outlook. All of this can be applied to our own role.
Replace “Web designer” with freelancer – or creative person – of any kind, and I think this is true (From here, by Paul Boag).
There are songs you here, and just know that – no matter what else – you’ll always love their creators for. Such it was with “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck,” a song that should, by all rights have disappeared into limbo, but instead became the song that made Super Furry Animals’ reputation.
The song was originally meant to be a b-side to “If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You,” the final single from the band’s first album, but was pulled at the last minute when Steely Dan refused to approve the sample that’s the basis for the song’s chorus (That “You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else”? That’s from Steely Dan’s “Show Biz Kids”:
“Showbusiness kids/Making movies of themselves/You know they don’t give a fuck/About anybody else,” it goes, in a lovely 1970s accusation of a culture that’d really take root a decade later. Oh, friends, you were so far ahead of your time, and no-one really listened anyway). Weirdly, wonderfully, the band persisted in trying to get the sample cleared, eventually giving Dan’s Donald Fagan an impressive 95% of the songwriting royalties and releasing the track as their Christmas single for 1996, complete with a sticker telling listeners with sensitive ears “Warning! This track contains the word **** 50 times!”
It also contains doo-wop harmonies, sleigh bells and the first sign of the anger that would come to the fore in later releases: “Out of focus ideology/Keeps the masses from majority,” the second verse goes before it complains about “Experts, brainwashed, tumble-dried.” The result? A protest song that’s never entirely explicit about what it’s protesting, and so becomes a wonderfully versatile fuck-you to authority and oppression in general, an expression of anger as an energy that you can dance and shout to as much and as loudly as you want. Wonderfully, despite being entirely unsuited to radioplay – There were edited versions that either removed the numerous “fuck”s, or in one great instance, replaced them with someone saying “monkeys” – it made it to #22 in the top 40.
Never underestimate people’s desire to have a revolution they can dance to, apparently.
Worth pointing out: When this song was played live, at least for the period where I’d be seeing the band as often as possible, this would be the final song of the night, and would last somewhere in the region of 10 minutes or so at least, with the band leaving the stage after the song as it sounds here, but Cian Ciaran keeping the Steely Dan loop going and seeing where he could take the song from there. We’d dance for as long as we could.
I first heard this song as a bootleg, downloaded from some site ahead of the release of Phantom Power back in… what, 2002? 2003? And I remember thinking, at the time, that this really was the ultimate Super Furry Animals song – It’s got the trad band bit, with the harmonica and the electronic piano and the guitars and drums with Gruff singing sweetly over the top (Even if what he’s actually singing is somewhat less than sweet: “I see/Televisions/Pretty pictures/Of starvation,” he sings at one point, almost making it sound an attractive proposition. Also, “I see fractures/I see fragments” remains one of my favorite lines of anything, ever), as well as the techno breakdown and the 1970s retro moment and everything that the band does so well. As a song, it’s a wonderful journey, evolving from the sampled circus sounds at the start to the glamorous, Bond theme-esque strings at the end that fall apart, drip into nothingness. In many ways, it was all downhill for the band from here – Certainly, the next album, Love Kraft, was a disappointment when compared to Phantom Power – but, really, what an incredible way to go out.
