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.
366 Songs 200: Cool Britannia
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.