There’s something to be said for a good song that builds before your ears, adding instruments and depth as if unfolding before you. Super Furry Animals’ “Suckers” is a fine example of this, adding a particularly plaintive vocal from Gruff Rhys and the occasional aural joke as it grows into full bloom by its end (The showy guitar effect at 2:41 after the lyric about “power ballad songs”), but underneath it all, a simple little heartbroken song about the end of a love affair. “It’s over/And we’d just begun,” Rhys sings somewhere between tongue-in-cheek showmanship and sincerity, “Oh, we’d just begun.”
On Owning It (Or Not, As The Case May Be)
I actually came across this in a different way recently — a startup, Hyperink, wanted to publish an eBook that was a collection of my previous posts. No brainer, until I realized that technically AOL now owns a majority of the things I’ve written online (after their purchase of TechCrunch in 2010). They were totally cool with me repurposing the content — kudos to them — but it’s interesting that I did have to ask. And it makes sense — they paid me to write those words.
I guess my point is that while I do actually value owning my own words, I’ve also spent the majority of my career not actually owning my own words.
– MG Siegler, from here. This is something I’ve been thinking about since my Feb-May rush of looking for work and wondering where my career was going. Almost everything I’ve written since… what, Fanboy Rampage!!! (which was a linkblog, and as such not original-content-heavy), has been the property of someone else. Certainly, the work I’m most proud of doesn’t belong to me in any legal sense. That’s depressing and worrying, but I can’t necessarily see a way past that right now; I can’t afford (financially) to take the time to write something that I do own, and I don’t have the clout to build in a rights-reversal clause into contracts with outlets that I’m working for these days. But it’s something I think about, often. Here’s Gina Trapani, from the same conversation thread:
Similar to what MG said about TechCrunch, it’s been difficult for me watching 4 years of my daily work on Lifehacker suffer from linkrot and broken images over the years. Gawker owns that content and I got paid for it, but it’s something I think about when I’m *not* getting paid to produce content.
Sometimes, I get depressed when I think about some of the things I created for io9. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot – a lot – of content I wrote for that site that was so of-the-moment or of-the-quality that I wouldn’t be too upset if it disappeared in the memory hole and was never seen again (It helps/hurts that, the more I look back on that time, the more I feel like it was bad for my development as a writer, but that’s another complaint for another day), but there were also plenty of stories/posts/essays/justplainideas that I wish that I had some ownership over. At the time, I didn’t think too much about it because (a) I had to come up with new ideas on a regular basis to hit deadlines and quotas, and (b) I had a sense of equity in the site, stupidly, because I’d been there since Day One (Since before Day One, even; I was part of the team writing for the beta version of the site before it had a name or went live), but now…? Yeah. There’s a bunch of things I wrote for io9 that I feel sad about not being able to use/recycle elsewhere.
Are You Ready For…?
This is apparently a presentation drawing by Jack Kirby used to sell the OMAC series to DC Comics, back in the 1970s. Firstly, it’s an astonishing piece of work. Secondly, OMAC is the comic that originated the phrase “the world that’s coming,” so this drawing is, oddly, directly responsible for this blog.
Thanks, Jack.
“Only Now Have I Come To Realize How Important Leaving Was For My Sanity, As Well”
When I moved out of New York, I knew at the time that it was the best decision for my career and pocketbook. Only now have I come to realize how important leaving was for my sanity, as well. Not that I was afflicted with claustrophobia or exhaustion or any of the pseudo-ailments with which so many hypochondriac New Yorkers diagnose themselves. Rather, I’d deliberately forgotten that life outside New York is just as pure and valid as life inside New York, which is a hazard of the City just the same as street crime, and one that’s far more prevalent.
New York makes it easy to forget that there are millions of people with hundreds of interests—NASCAR, surfing, raising chickens, owning land—for whom a tiny constellation of concrete boroughs that are frozen for half the year is not adequate. New York makes it easy to forget that many Americans would probably find paying $950 for a 10-by-10 room overlooking garbage cans either unaffordable or unappealing, or both. New York makes it easy to forget that the vast majority of people in the world don’t read Gawker, The Awl, the Observer, the New Yorker or even the New York Times, and that that doesn’t necessarily make those people uninformed.
From Cord Jefferson’s piece, here.
This resonates with me, even though I’ve never lived in New York (and suspect, now, that I wouldn’t enjoy doing so; Portland does that to you, as does age). I feel like we left San Francisco for similar reasons, even if we didn’t know it at the time.
Ess Dee Ay Dee
It’s San Diego Comic-Con this week, the time of the year when the comic industry gets even more self-obsessed, and the rest of the genre entertainment industry joins in; I’m not going to the show this year – Second time running, although this year I had a period of thinking “Do I want to go? Maybe I do,” unlike last year’s very definite sense of “I don’t want to go, not in the slightest, how can I get out of this?” – but that hasn’t stopped me from having at least one San Diego Anxiety Dream.
On the years when I covered the show for io9, I would get those every single night of the week or so before the show; covering the show for that site was a big deal; we were all (“All” being, in this case, five of us) given schedules for where we were meant to be on each day, what panels we were to cover and write up, what parties or extra-curricular activities we were expected to attend, and so on. Your time very definitely wasn’t your own, but that was part of the thrill of it in a weird way; you were being “a journalist!” and so everything was okay. But with that weight of expectation came the week of pre-show nightmares, each one a melodrama of missing a panel for whatever reason – it was always something mundane – and the result being calamity and disaster. Everything will be your fault if it goes wrong, the dreams explained, and you know you’re going to be late for something, don’t you?
I always thought I was the only person who had these dreams until recently, when I saw various other comic journalists write about them on Twitter. It was a weird moment of shared weight and shame, and also incredible relief that I’m not going to be at the show this time around. As I said, I’m still getting the dreams, but I wake up and remember that I don’t have to be at the convention and everything seems much lighter afterwards.
Recently Read, Prose (7/9/12)
The joy of a week with a day off in the middle is that you can get a lot more reading done, it seems; I’m as surprised as you are that I managed to get through all of the above in such a short time, but there you go (Then again, considering I ripped through G. Willow Wilson’s wonderful Alif The Unseen in about five hours yesterday, completely sucked in and wanting to find out what happened next, maybe it’s not so surprising; it’s a very good book, by the way. I said to Kate that it’s maybe a little too ambitious for its own good, but goddamn if that ambition doesn’t make it compelling stuff).
Both Time and Chance and What Becomes were, in their own ways, disappointments. I remember loving AL Kennedy’s fiction years ago, when I lived in Scotland, but either my tastes or her writing have changed, and this book of short stories left me unmoved and frustrated by the weight of her prose. The Brennert, meanwhile, ended up annoying me; the book, in theory, gives two different versions of the same man a chance to take the road less taken for a short while, but it felt so weirdly biased in the direction of one of those versions that I couldn’t take it seriously after awhile.
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was also kind of disappointing; Jenny Lawson’s blog is hilarious, but she tries to keep up the same intensity in this memoir, and it’s exhausting – Blogging and longer-form prose are different beasts, and I found myself wishing that her editor had pushed her to slow down, and to try and come up with something less in-your-face more often, if only for variety’s sake.
Both Four Letter Word and Otherwise Known As The Human Condition were enjoyable enough; the former fell prey to the anthology problem of only being as entertaining as the participant you’re reading, as the conceit (fictional love letters) wasn’t exactly strong enough to overwhelm what might’ve otherwise felt unfinished, and the latter is something I read as much through curiosity of wanting to read more culture essays because of my Time gig than anything else, although it ended up making me want to read even more of them, which is some kind of victory.
And so, then, to the old favorites. I’ve reached the point in Rucka’s Kodiak novels where I lost interest/enjoyment the first time through (Patriot Acts, not Shooting at Midnight), but at least this time I know why – I’ll save that for a post about the series when I finish The Walking Dead, though – and the Star Trek novel was as entertaining as I wanted/needed it to be, which is damning with faint praise far more than it deserves; of all the Trek I’ve been reading lately, the Deep Space Nine cycle is the most interesting, and the most well-written, by some distance.
366 Songs 178: Keep Yourself Alive
366 Songs 177: I Saw Her Again (Last Night)
If any musical act did any more to promote having four singers in the band than the Mamas and the Papas, I’d like to find out more about them. “I Saw Her Again (Last Night)” has this great complexity in its vocals that goes beyond simple harmonizing, or even call-and-response, although both are in there. There’s an architectural quality to the way they’re used, with voices building voices, adding up to this amazing thing, this cathedral of sounds.
It’s helped by a string arrangement that’s just the right side of syruppy; listen to the slide they start at 1:46 as the vocals do their “And it makes me feel.” There’s something in the way everything goes together than just works, even though it likely shouldn’t.
Everytime I listen to the Mamas and the Papas, I always feel like I should listen to them more, and I never ever get around to doing that properly. There’s always so much other stuff to take care of, instead. One day, one day…
366 Songs 176: People Are Strange
What’s strange – appropriately, considering the song – about the Doors is the obsessive quality that fans of the band have, the idea that there’s something special and unique about the band. They’re talking about Jim Morrison, of course, because as “People Are Strange” demonstrates, the music that accompanied him is close to the kinds of things that bands like the Loving Spoonful, the Zombies and even the Monkees were putting out at the same time.
I don’t mean that as an insult; I love that kind of music, and actually find more interest in it than in Morrison’s louche vocals. But it’s funny that Doors devotees are the kinds of people who’d make a case for the band being different from their contemporaries when they’re so amazingly similar. Listen to the plinky-plonk piano here, or the guitar solo at 0:58 that could’ve easily come from John Sebastian or someone similar; there’s a genericism in American rock and pop from this time, a similarity in form and sound, and the Doors don’t come anywhere close to escaping that in this song.
Of course, the Doors’ version is still superior to the Echo and the Bunnymen version that came from the soundtrack to The Lost Boys, which takes the original and somehow makes it sound like the Stray Cats have had their way with it, even with the hilarious instrumental break that tries to insert the psych break that the Doors were so beloved for:
This may have been the version of the song I first heard at age 12, but still. Could do better, Mr. Echo.
366 Songs 175: That’s The Way God Planned It
I’m not the most religious person – Is it agnostic, to believe in something, but not necessarily have any love for the organized religions as such? If so, then, yeah; that’s me – but this has long been one of my favorite songs, and it’s all because of the performance. Billy Preston was, for awhile, not just a spectacular keyboard player (Seriously, just listen to him here) but an amazing vocalist and one working in a style that put him somewhere in the middle of an imaginary spectrum between the Beatles and Sly and The Family Stone… which is to say, pretty much my ideal kind of music. The That’s The Way God Planned It and Encouraging Words albums that he released through Apple, both produced by (and featuring guitar from) George Harrison, are two of my favorite albums of all time, and “That’s The Way God Planned It” shows why. There’s something so effortless about the way this song sounds, but so insistent and irresistible, with Preston sounding so… happy, I guess?
There’s joy in Preston’s music; the joy of performance, the joy of life, the joy of God, maybe…? But it’s contagious. There may be bands and performers who are closer to my heart than Billy Preston, but I’m not sure that there are any who make me happier.