This song is, of course, just a detournment of the more familiar British standard, “Rule Britannia,” but it’s all in the way the joke is told; the jazzy horns, the louche delivery of the vocals (The offhand “take a trip!” just kills me, every time) and the way that the whole thing just skewers the idea of “hip” Britain as a brand or a meme, decades before Britpop revived the notion entirely devoid of irony. There are many reasons to love the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, but I’m not sure any of them are stronger than this one.
“Because Escape is Unthinkable and Unwanted”
I was trying to explain this to a friend in email, and the only compact term I could come up with for what I’m talking about was “urban ennui.” Urban ennui is that feeling that arises when you’re caught between a city’s majesty and its dungeon. It’s the combination of pretending you’re sober enough to talk to a pretty girl on somebody’s balcony at midnight and curling into a fetal ball in your apartment because the pressure is too much a week later, and then doing it all again because escape is unthinkable and unwanted.
Seriously, there are times when David Brothers writes things and I want to shake my fist at the screen because he’s put it so well. Holy fuck, people; he’s an amazing writer.
(From here, all of which should be read.)
“I’ve Come To Think That Overinterpretation of Data is The Curse of The Modern World”
My belief in data has been shaken. In fact, I’ve come to think that overinterpretation of data is the curse of the modern world. In the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, the value-at-risk models were internally consistent but lacked all sense of history. They could not account for a black swan — or a Mule.
And anybody running a web publication or a web marketing campaign is equally blinded by data. A publisher maximize pageviews only to realize that they’ve locked themselves into a passionate group of readers that will defect at the slightest provocation. Advertising agencies attempt to bring down the average CPM — and in so doing turn web sites into an obstacle course of ineffective banners. Or they track performance (yes, even now) and reward sites with the least attractive audience.
That’s Gawker boss Nick Denton, from here.
It makes me wonder what, exactly, the new metric for blog success is going to become, if pageviews and chasing advertisers is suddenly being disregarded like that. When I was at Gawker, that was very definitely the way that success was measured, and the idea that the company has changed that makes me interested and just a little apprehensive. After all, as much as everyone who isn’t Gawker would love to pretend otherwise, the company still tends to set the latest trend in blog business logic, for better or worse. If success is suddenly going to be measured in terms of – God forbid! – quality of writing, that’d be the kind of thing that changes the game more than a little bit. But, of course, what are the odds of that happening…?
366 Songs 199: Galveston
There was a period, awhile back, when I got really into Jimmy Webb as a songwriter – He’s the one who wrote this song for Glen Campbell – and this was probably the song that convinced me that, when he was good, he was really good; to be fair, there’s a lot in the production of the Glen Campbell version that wins me over (Those strings, for one, but also the start, the bass falling down and drawing you into it), but the version I first heard – an R.E.M. cover of sorts, from the Rough Cut documentary – was this stripped down version that just makes you want to hear more… Or, it did me, at least…
I admit it, I’m also a sucker for any song that goes – as this one does – “I am so afraid of dying” so bluntly.
366 Songs 198: Half A World Away
The standout song from R.E.M.’s Out of Time, back when I first bought the album as a painfully sincere 16-year-old, and still my favorite. While the instrumentation fulfills the role of almost all of the other songs on the album – mostly acoustic, mid-tempo, restrained and utterly pleasant – what always appealed to me about the song was the aching longing in Michael Stipe’s singing, the vibration and voice cracking that lends it some kind of weird emotional authenticity that really appealed to me back then. It was “Losing My Religion” as a single than made me buy the album, but it was this song that made me into an R.E.M. fanatic for years, excitedly watching for their television appearances and hoping that they’d do this one.
366 Songs 197: After Hours
I won’t lie; the shooting in Aurora, Colorado at the end of last week flattened me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. Not just emotionally, although it did that – I felt exhausted by it, just saddened that such a thing could happen and that someone could do it, if that doesn’t sound too pathetic and naive – but practically, too, as it meant an immediate rewrite for some things I had written ahead of deadline that would suddenly seem crass and in poor taste when they eventually appeared (Two things had to be replaced altogether) on a day when I already had too much to do. The reason I tell you that is to explain why the blog essentially went dark of the weekend; I just needed to get offline and get my head straight again.
So, have this song, as I return and begin again. One of my favorites, because Maureen Tucker’s vocals are so artless and honest, you can’t help but be drawn in, and find yourself smiling despite yourself. Such beautifully vulnerable lyrics, too (“Someday I know/Someone will look into my eyes/And say hello/You’re my very special one” always gets me, I admit).
I first heard this song in a significantly different version, years before I heard the Velvet Underground original:
For some reason, Michael Stipe’s performance in this version from the end of R.E.M.’s Tourfilm made me wonder if this was actually a “real song” at all, or just some joke song the band had made up to finish off shows. I remember finding the original and being both surprised and happy that it had an authenticity that the version I knew so well lacked.
The Internet Really Is Bad For You
Questions about the Internet’s deleterious effects on the mind are at least as old as hyperlinks. But even among Web skeptics, the idea that a new technology might influence how we think and feel—let alone contribute to a great American crack-up—was considered silly and naive, like waving a cane at electric light or blaming the television for kids these days. Instead, the Internet was seen as just another medium, a delivery system, not a diabolical machine. It made people happier and more productive. And where was the proof otherwise?
Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.
– From “Is The Web Driving Us Mad?,” here. Reading this, I was reminded of this recent study from the UK, which makes the same point; the Internet is/can be bad for us. Depressingly, I’m not surprised; I have found myself having that very described anxiety and “need” to check the Internet and see what’s happening, and I tell myself that I need to for my job, even though I know that’s not exactly what’s going on. It’s why I’ve started to try to remain unplugged during the weekends, or at least as unplugged as possible. Redirecting that desire to read things and learn things, and instead looking for other experiences to fill up that part of me.
Lying Liars, Journalists, Manipulation, etc.
When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals scuttle election bids or knock billions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about ‘how the story unfolded’—media manipulation is the status quo. It becomes, as Daniel Boorstin, author The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, once put it, a “thicket …which stands between us and the facts of life.
Today the media—driven by blogs—is assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or CNN or some tiny blog. They warp everything you read online—and let me tell you, thumbnail-cheating YouTube videos and paid-edit Wikipedia articles are only the beginning.
That’s Ryan Holiday, self-styled “media manipulator,” writing about the reason it’s so easy to detourn the media these days, in Forbes. He’s so skilled at it, he says, he’s even written a book about his experiences, called Trust Me, I’m A Liar – as well as being the subject, two days later, of a profile… in Forbes:
Holiday does it for the attention, the opportunity to point out some of the excesses of the modern blogosphere, and the LOLs. Empires will not fall because he claimed someone once sneezed on him. Still, it gives one reason to stop and think about what the quest for traffic and eyeballs does to news. Depending on how you look at it, stunts like this either erode the trust a reader has in a publication, or point out that it may have been misplaced to begin with. It’s not a big leap to imagine somebody using those same tools for more nefarious purposes.
“A well made article and a poorly made article both do clicks the same way,” says Holiday. “There’s no incentive to do good work. We know that quotas make cops do shitty things, or academic admissions offices do shitty things, and they make bloggers do shitty things too.”
His theory is that, with so much output expected of journalists and writers these days, sources can easily lie and get away with it because the time to fact check is at a minimum, and the need to be “first” is king. There’s definitely something to these criticisms – Look at the Healthcare reporting or, on a far smaller scale, Kate Kotler’s misreporting of a San Diego Comic-Con press conference and then vehement defense of said before reality and an editor forced an awkward apology for proof (The Kotler thing has been in my brain for a few days now; there’s something to be written about it, but I’m not sure what just yet) – but I can’t escape the fact that what is actually happening here is that someone is saying “These people are under pressure so I am breaking trust just to prove that I can, aren’t I a hero?” And the answer, for me, is “No, you’re a dick.”
This whole subject is a hot topic right now, thanks to Greenpeace’s ArcticReady campaign, in which they have created social media accounts and websites pretending to be Shell oil, and gone about pretending to be inept, mean and generally pathetic. As a prank, it’s working; lots and lots of people are sharing links about how terrible Shell is, and ha ha they don’t get how Twitter works. But, thing is, none of those people know they’re being lied to. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but my reaction to this isn’t “Yay, you’re proving a point!” but “You are lying to people for your own amusement, and that’s not actually okay.” Martin Robins at the New Statesman put it best for me:
The real villain here is Greenpeace. This is an NGO that thinks it is acceptable to lie to the public, to lie to bloggers and journalists, and to then intimidate writers with threatening emails warning of legal action. This absolutely is not okay. I don’t care if you’re saving the Arctic, rescuing kittens from YouTube’s vicious pet-celebrity training camps, or training pandas to pull famine-ridden children out of earthquake debris; to behave in this deceitful way demonstrates an astonishing amount of contempt for the public – not least for environmentalist supporters who spread their message in good faith only to find themselves forced into embarrassing retractions.
And for what? It’s not like there’s any shortage of real scandals to draw attention to. As I write this, Reuters have just reported that Shell could face a US$5 billion fine for a major oil spill off the Nigerian coast that affected 950 square kilometres of water and caused serious harm to local communities. An analysis published last year by the United Nation’s Environment Programme estimated that it could take thirty years to clean up damage to the Ogonil and region in the Niger Delta, pollution caused in part by Shell’s activities in the area. With real scandals like this to cover, inventing fake ones isn’t just unnecessary but actually quite crass.
The defense of “The media are lazy” doesn’t actually hold water here; the media are covering that the Arctic Ready campaign is a lie – I wrote about it for Digital Trends on Monday – but “the media” is outpaced by social media, and the fact that people want to believe the Arctic Ready campaign… which, for me, brings it back to the fact that those whole think they’re lying to expose something are really just exposing the bad sides of themselves and those who listen to them.
366 Songs 196: Fender Roads
It’s one of those days when David Holmes’ Oceans soundtracks seem like the best thing to listen to; the retro funk, the seeming ease of the whole thing as it swings along, the almost architectural balance between all of the different instruments, all suggesting a world where we’re all more stylish, with more swagger and more likelihood of getting through the day not only in one piece, but with everyone else looking at us in jealousy and barely-contained lust. Oh, to dream of such a life…
Look At Me, Leading Time.com Again (I Am Freaking Out Over Here)
