Even though Flood was the big hit album, Apollo 18, the follow-up, is the one that I still think is the best of the They Might Be Giants albums, filled with pop songs that just… worked, for want of a better way of putting it. “The Statue Got Me High” is an example of that; if you can look beyond the production – with the drum machine making it sound, weirdly, far cheaper and tackier than it actually is – there’s a great little psychedelic song at the heart of this one, with – again – some great harmonies despite their appalling singing voices. Much like my love of Billy Bragg, I suspect that my love of They Might Be Giants is based upon some strange notion of adoring the idea of the song, rather than the song itself.
366 Songs 205: Dead
Not for the first time, I find myself wishing that They Might Be Giants wrote songs for other people to perform while listening to “Dead,” from their 1990 album Flood (It’s the closest they had to a crossover album; it’s the one with “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Instanbul (Not Constantinople)” on it). The flat-vowelled accents of Johns Linnell and Flansburgh do this song no favors, which is a real shame; it has a lovely structure, especially in the call-and-response bridge that starts at 1:33, and the arrangement that has both Johns harmonizing for the majority of the song feels like it deserves singers with less nasal voices, to be brutally honest. Despite that (because of that?), this is an earworm of a song that nestles into your brain sneakily, distracting you with the vocals and letting the wonderful piano that underpins the whole thing quietly slip into your head and decide to stay for awhile.
At Nighttime I Go Out And
Can You Crowdfund Journalism?
Under increasing financial pressure from the Web and the decline of print advertising, newspapers and other traditional media outlets have been laying off staff and trying to fill the gap with services such as Journatic—the hyper-local aggregator that uses offshore workers— or simply doing without such things as copy editing. Are there further solutions to that reporting gap? Crowdsourcing journalism through sites like Reddit could be one, but crowdfunding could be another: One journalist in Michigan has raised funding through a Kickstarter campaign so he can travel around the U.S. interviewing people about the upcoming election. Could crowdfunding allow other journalists to do investigative or in-depth projects as well?
From here.
I have, no joke, been thinking about this on and off pretty much since I first discovered Kickstarter, as much from a selfish point-of-view as the high-minded theoretical sense. I have done internal math in my head about how much it would take for me to be an independent comics journalist for a year, writing for myself and my own site – whatever that site might be – and whether or not I thought I could raise enough money to do it, leaving the writing gigs for Newsarama, Comics Alliance and Robot 6 (and SpinoffOnline, which isn’t a comic site but does take enough of my time each month that I’d need to drop it if I was to do this properly) without just crippling myself financially in the process. For me, I don’t think the money’s there; I’m not enough of a name, without enough of a readerbase with the kind of disposable income to fund what I’d really need for that period of time, especially because they get enough of me for free online as is (Whether or not my online ubiquity has damaged my “brand” is something else I think about, a lot; that’s something for another day, though). But in the wider, theoretical sense…? I think crowdfunding is definitely a future for journalism, if not the future.
We’re moving away from crowdfunding being some kind of novelty and spectacle to just a fact of the modern Internet, and as soon as that happens, then we’re likely to see crowdfunding for all manner of projects, both creative and otherwise. Whatever you can manage to sell to the Internet at large, in fact.
366 Songs 202/203/204: Grow Your Own/Own Up Time/Almost Grown
It’s been a non-stop day; I went from feeling ahead of the crowd by lunch to feeling crushed by deadlines now, and I’m not entirely sure why. So, in order to get my energy and lust for life back, it’s time to listen to some Small Faces instrumentals. I don’t know why, but there’s something spectacularly energizing about these tracks for me, the relentless nature of them, the balancing of all the ingredients, and way they all desperately make me want to dance…
My favorite of the three posted here is easily this last one, “Almost Grown,” which has a perfect push-and-pull momentum going on that, at the very least, should have you bobbing your head as you listen along. Add to that, a particularly crunchy guitar and equally grumbly hammond organ, and you’ve got my love happily sewn up even before you get to Steve Marriott improvising towards the end “Oh, don’t talk that way…!”
Seriously. It doesn’t get much better than this, as far as I’m concerned; just listening to these three and I find myself ready and raring to go, no matter what lies ahead. Now that, dear readers, is the power of music.
“Success Is Very Fragile”
It’s easy to get excited and arrogant when things are going well but it is important to remember that success is very fragile. Digg sold for $500K after being worth $200 million just a few years ago. In the same time period, RIM, maker of the Blackberry, lost 95% (!) of its value. There is continual disruption in our industry and you are likely to fail if you get complacent or stop evolving.
The Internet is a shark.
Sometimes, You Feel Like Your Brain Is Missing
Cutting Room Floor, Etc.
Who is John Blake?
Well, as anyone who’s seen The Dark Knight Rises already knows, he’s the true moral center of Gotham City with more impassioned belief in justice than either Commissioner Gordon and Bruce Wayne seemingly put together, and more detective skills than either, as well. More to the point, as anyone who’s seen The Dark Knight Rises already knows, his name isn’t even John; it’s Robin. You know, as in Batman And…? There’s a reason – beyond the need for a last minute twist, the “ahhhhh” that comes from recognition and realizing that you’ve been outsmarted all along (even if the last minute twist seems to come from nowhere) – that The Dark Knight Rises saves the true identity of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character until the very end of the movie, after all. It’s not just that identifying his character as Robin from the get-go would’ve left you spending the entire movie waiting for him to put on his own mask and tights at some point, wading into the action to kick-ass and save Batman’s butt in some surprise denouement, either (That role, instead, is filled with Catwoman, with a quip about gunplay that feels curiously off-color, considering recent events). No, the reason that Christopher Nolan and cohorts needed to keep the identity of the latest Robin a secret is this: It apparently sucks to be Robin.
That’s the opening to an entirely different version from this week’s essay for Time’s Entertainment section than the one you’ll see. It was another of those weeks where I wrote the thing, thinking that it was one thing, only to discover many hours later – Seriously, the first version took me most of Monday – that I was entirely wrong and I needed to start from scratch and angle it an entirely different way altogether.
Part of that comes from the fact that this was one of those times when Stephanie Abrahams, my fine fine editor, pitched me the story instead of the other way around, and I didn’t necessarily have a good enough handle on it when I started writing the first time. Another part comes from the fact that I started it within an hour or so after leaving The Dark Knight Rises at the theater, and that is actually a stupidly short amount of time to try and process what I’d just watched – I have to say, I think I liked TDKR as much as I disliked The Dark Knight, which is saying something – but, really? Most of it comes from the fact that, I thought this story was Thing A, only to discover in the process of writing the final paragraph, that it was actually Thing B all along. Literally, even as I was writing the end of the first version, I was thinking “Oh shit, oh shit, this is what I should’ve said instead!” I got up from the desk after finishing, trying to work out if I really wanted to junk 1500+ words worth of effort, and immediately started outlining the version of the piece you can actually read on Time Entertainment by hand, knowing that I was going to end up doing it.
(I wrote the outline by hand, then went to the gym to give myself some space to consider whether it was worth throwing away everything I’d done and starting over, knowing that it’d mean I’d be writing until midnight most likely, and then having to start again the next morning at something like 6am in order to meet the deadline. Depressingly, I just ended up more convinced that it was exactly the right thing to do; in my favor, it turned out that I only needed to start work at 7am on Tuesday to make it happen.)
There’s something to be said, for me and my process at least, in knowing when you’re defeated and need to start again. I find a value in writing things that end up entirely discarded, even if they’re just roadmaps about where not to go the next time around – although, I admit, I’d rather find pieces of writing I can lift wholescale and put into something else later. Mind you, if I could know when to cut and run earlier, I wouldn’t have any real problem with that.
366 Songs 201: The Intro And The Outro
There is almost nothing anyone can say to this song that compares with just listening to it. One of the few comedy songs that is just as much fun after multiple listens as it is the very first time, not least of all because it’s weirdly catchy despite not really being a song at all.
And, yes; that really is Eric Clapton on banjo.
“We Pile Up Digital Possessions and Expressions, And We Tend To Leave Them Piled Up, Like Virtual Hoarders”
Nevertheless: people die. For most of us, the fate of tweets and status updates and the like may seem trivial (who cares — I’ll be dead!). But increasingly we’re not leaving a record of life by culling and stowing away physical journals or shoeboxes of letters and photographs for heirs or the future. Instead, we are, collectively, busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff: five billion images and counting on Flickr; hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos uploaded every day; oceans of content from 20 million bloggers and 500 million Facebook members; two billion tweets a month. Sites and services warehouse our musical and visual creations, personal data, shared opinions and taste declarations in the form of reviews and lists and ratings, even virtual scrapbook pages. Avatars left behind in World of Warcraft or Second Life can have financial or intellectual-property holdings in those alternate realities. We pile up digital possessions and expressions, and we tend to leave them piled up, like virtual hoarders.
From here, by Rob Walker.